Arctic Rhetoric and Inuit Sovereignty

Home , Eskimology, High Arctic relocation, Smudging, The Mother of All Demos, USS Nautilus (SSN-571)

Tad Lemieux

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

English Language and Literature

Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario

By all accounts the world is in a time of monumental change wherein myriad crises and revolutions—social, financial, technological, geological—appear in the guise of the future. These stresses to global habitability, promised by data and early signs, appear now most clearly in the guise of the future. The Arctic has long been the great citadel of the future, whether of finance and nation state nomos, the transcendent border and passage of the North, or in the extraction of what waits there. Climate-related change and the Arctic are linked together by these threats to habitability, thus to the very being of being on Earth. What happens to the Arctic, we’re told, happens to us all. If today

“Arctic rhetoric” refers to geopolitical disputation situated in the nation-state, taking the

Arctic as its object, a worldly rhetoric returns it back into an intensive and immanent rhythm of sharing in relation. What, then, is Arctic rhetoric today? This dissertation answers to this question by reconsidering their constitutive terms at the intersection of shared finite relation and the world. But rather than extract Arctic rhetoric from “inside,”

I trace the approach of these contemporary theories of rhetorical motion and ontology in the Inuit Nunangat. What we find waiting is a theory of granting—of sovereignty—that moves intensively and all throughout the discursive and non-discursive matters of worldly rhetoric. Taking these insights seriously means there must be an encounter with those living ones there now in the Arctic. Thus, I stage these material rhetorics alongside

Inuit philosophy, in the context of these radical changes atmosphere and technology, and find an Arctic rhetoric that names itself.

ii My argument follows three tracks of social, technological, and bodily change in these contexts. First, I consider Inuit and Greenpeace activist response to a proposed seismic survey in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait in the frame of the “end of the Arctic.” I ask what material rhetoric can tell us about this engagement with the terms of sovereignty. By considering changes to the Arctic climate as the rhetorical text for “the end of the

Arctic,” this chapter emerges a shared finitude that encounters the terms of “Inuit” and

“sovereignty.” Second, the body of the living seal is approached as a rhetorical tissue, confronted by the Inuit-led #sealfie movement on social media to undermine global anti- seal efforts. While Inuit reaffirmed their claim—economic and existential—to the body of the seal, a worldly rhetoric at the end of the Arctic returns the living seal in the question of finitude. Third, I consider the Nunavut Code Club and the imagination of

Inuit coders in the context of resource-extractive futures and virtual lifetimes. I ask: what grants this future of interconnectivity? Finally, through a reading of our shared finitude, I reconstruct Arctic rhetoric within the history of the planetary change turning back, finally, to the living ones there now.

iii “Acknowledgements”

What does an “acknowledgements section” give to the content of which it finds itself a part? We know there’s a formality and—is it a grace? Either way, to acknowledge is to perform the acknowledgment, “the acknowledgement,” as the coming before, the vouching and reinforcement in the time before beginning of what is and calls for acknowledgement. This text, so it stands, for the acknowledgement. But in my own experience, when I open a book or when I download it, I expect to see “the acknowledgements,” and I expect to pass over them. We know what they are and what they do and why, and we know that everything comes from somewhere and something, and we know that others know.

As writing, often passed over, “the acknowledgements” is also a genre within a genre, so often strange to the relation of the text, as though the author were trying to imagine themselves apart from their object just long enough to give what was expected.

As a genre it demands a language and form, and it certainly expects an ethos, and the time to give “acknowledgements”—for the moments where one emerges finally, recognizably, in expectation to the genre and for the acknowledged, have waited for you to see this, to have been recognized, “by me.” The expectation is what precedes us as the writing, as the genre, as the gesture, turned to they who find themselves named by it. And if this expectation of and in the genre encounters, maybe impersonally, the time that those relations with others emerge in “acknowledgement,” then the acknowledgement is also the vulnerability of being recognized in time—just in time. As “the acknowledgement” is a genre preceding the task of the language that it follows, it testifies to following itself by demonstration, admission, and retrospect. So it is that “the acknowledgement” mirrors

iv itself, like a mirror before a mirror, reflecting—what? Is it the acknowledgement of “the acknowledgement”? Maybe this is why it’s so often that only the acknowledged read the acknowledgements, because there is the end of the waiting for the finding what was already where it was supposed to be. If “acknowledgements” are here because they are expected to be here, then it is also “the acknowledgement” before language. The task is no less than to recognize recognition and to return to it just in time. Years later now, writing this, I’m finding first the expectation. All the same, so I find it. “In the light of this,” I will try to say what can’t be said. How does “the acknowledgement” find itself a part of what follows?

The dissertation that follows is the outcome of many processes and events. (In

2015, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship funded this project, with my thanks.) It’s common today to read and to hear that things are bad in general and getting worse, and that the fruit of what intends from doing something like this, at a time like now, is withering if it has not already fallen from the vine. So one of the processes of this dissertation, in that light, is significant debt. The

“acknowledgements” should acknowledge a debt, and I believe this is true in the extreme.

Our acknowledgements today should “acknowledge” that process, which, like

“acknowledgements,” is expected to be there.

But now I’ll say this, in light of the form of thanks or gratitude. Jankélévitch thought that forgiveness whispered in a quiet voice, because, like finitude, it never really seems be there, and yet, isn’t it always? How we grasp this whisper is one of our great questions. Maybe the acknowledgement is like that too. Let me share this. For a long time

I have been a solitary man, solitary but not unaccompanied, not alone. But solitude is always a risk. So for many years now, while I was writing this dissertation, I have mostly

v been able to decide on when to go to sleep and when to wake up. In that time, in that ability to make the decision, I have been able to linger in the morning light through the window, and I remember the breeze so often rolling through the curtains, and the sound of footsteps outside, and laughter, and also in the night, maybe too often illuminated by a screen or two, laying in warm comfort with the sound of breathing, in a quiet gentle companionship. What this text “acknowledges,” what it has meant is a long time of an abiding touch. I have had the time to hold and to touch a little cat that I have lived with, for her to see me often and to know me and remember my rhythms, and she has often nestled and gathered with me in warmth and comfort. And I’ve so often held close in touch to the person I share part of my life with, and have been touched, and for that touch to endure and stay. That touch has nourished this dissertation as a quiet whisper, and with it my life, which will sustain and has been sustained. There is no debt or acknowledgement that can withdraw from that.

And,

Matt, my oldest friend, with whom I lived many lives, who taught me to play guitar, who made me a guitar that will always follow me with a secret letter he wrote behind the body, that I found, who now has a little daughter named Poppy, and who lives just in the way we dreamed about when we were younger together. And Matty F, who I still think about, do you remember the kitchen table, the music, and the laughing? It’s here too. Jon is also here, who taught me a lot about trees, and who is now with little Ash where he belongs.

vi I still remember the long conversations with Mrinalini Greedharry, who was and is my first teacher. And Bruce Dadey, who introduced me to rhetoric long ago.

Jennifer Henderson and Barbara Leckie, both of whom fought for me, I wonder if they remember, and who, in some way, trusted me. Their concern and care, their intelligence and impact, is here, and brought me here.

And Sarah Brouillette, who I only wish I talked to more often, who has taught me more than most, even while I have been remote, and who always agreed to be there anyway, who actually cares.

And Donna Patrick and Adam Barrows, whose generosity I don’t know how to repay, but

I will try. And Erik Doxtader, who didn’t have to but did, and whose work has strongly guided me for years.

Shaun Stevenson, who is weird and tells jokes in secret, who is an incisive intelligence and wit, who always felt sort of familiar, who has for a long time informed my thinking, but most importantly has been my good friend. You’re here too.

And David Thomas, who a long time ago hugged me unexpectedly, who has been one of the most provocative people I have known in life, who helped me when I was alone, who—can I be honest, David?—is one of the great people and one of my cherished friendships.

vii Stuart J. Murray—what can I say? Nothing that follows, nothing at all, nothing in my writing or my life, is absent of you. I’ve asked too much and you’ve given more than that.

So I would only ask one last thing after all these years, that I could call you my friend.

Mom and dad, and Jesse, and his children, and our families, who were patient and loving, and who were excited when I wasn’t, who will always be there, and who know why.

And Pumpky. If I could only speak the words, I would.

Tiff-Annie, still, in the still of the night.

viii Table of Contents

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….………... ii

“Acknowledgements”.……………………………………………………...……..…… iv

Table of Contents ……………..…………………………………………………...…... ix

Preface ……………..…………………………………………...………………………. xi

Introduction …………………………………………..……………….………….…….. 1

1. Claim and Research Questions …………………..……...…...……………….. 1

2. Arctic …………………………………….………...………………………… 14

I. The End, The Opening …………………………...…...……………... 14

II. The Name ……………………………………...……………………. 20

III. The Human ………………………..……………...…...……….…… 31

3. Rhetoric ………………………………..………...……………………………47

4. Enablement …………………………………..……………...…...………...… 51

5. Granting ……………………………………...………...……………………. 51

6. Passage …………………………………….…………...……………………. 55

7. Chapter and Style Breakdown ……………..….…………...…...……………. 61

I. Chapter 1 ……………………..….……………...……………………. 61

II. Chapter 2 ……………………..….…………...………………...……. 61

III. Chapter 3 ……………………..……..………...……………………. 62

i. Chapter 3: Further Discussion …..……..………...…………… 63

Methods ……………………………………...... ……….……………………………… 70

Chapter 1: Arctic Rhetoric: The End of the Arctic, The Future of Baffin Bay ...… 79

The Future of the Arctic… ……………………………..………………………. 85

ix Rhythm “in” the Rhetoric “of” Sovereignty ……………………………………. 90

…The Future of Baffin Bay ………………….………….……………………. 103

Save the Arctic …………………………………….…...………...…………… 108

Conclusion …………………………………………….………………………. 117

Nalunaqtuq ……………………………………………….…………… 121

Chapter 2: Life and Death of the Body of the Seal ………………………………… 126

Selfie, Sealfie ………………………………………….………………………. 134

Baby, Seal …………………………………….…...……..……………………. 143

Knife, Cut ………………………………………….….………………………. 147

Coût, Cout-eau ………………..……………….…...…………………………. 151

Chapter 3: printf(“Inuit”); …………………………………...……………...……… 154

The Passage of… …………………………………..….………………………. 169

…Expectation… ………………………….…...………………………………. 177

…Waited ……………………………….……………...……………………… 187

In Conclusion ………………………………….…...…………………………...... 190

x Preface

In my library there’s an old copy of Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos.1 The last section of this book is called “The Eskimos: Past and Present.” On the first page of this final section, Freuchen, by this time an old man, writes that he’s been travelling “in and out” of the Arctic for almost seventy-five years.2 The Arctic regions, he says, “are by no means immune to progress and new developments.”3 The story of the Arctic sensitivity to change is an old story, retold in many different ways. But Freuchen wants to say that the changes to the Arctic, and the increasingly common narrative at the time which gauged those changes to Inuit peoples to be negative, were misguided. “Those who believe in the unfailing, original bliss of the natives might do well to remember” the catastrophe,4 of starvation, desperation, struggle, and death. No doubt Hobbes and Schmitt would have dutifully nodded at this comment. Freuchen then relays the story of a steady progression in Greenland and in North America, ending in 1959 just before his own death. “I have seen many things in the Arctic and I have done many things there,” he says, “and my body is tired, yearning for rest and relaxation.”5 He continues, “Far from being

1 Freuchen was a Danish explorer who, with Knud Rasmussen, undertook the First Thule Expedition to test Robert Peary’s claims about a channel dividing Peary Land from Greenland. Freuchan, along with Therkel Mathiassen, also participated in Rasmussen’s Fifth Thule Expedition, an indispensible anthropological text cataloguing Inuit cultures and stories from across the North American Arctic. Freuchen and Mathiassen would themselves author significant texts in and for the study of “Eskimology.” See Peter Freuchen, Book of the Eskimos, edited by Dagmar Freuchen (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1961). See also Knud Rasmussen, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921-24. Vol 7: 1. Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1929); Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921-24. Vol. 8: 1-2. The Netsilik Eskimos, Social Life and Spiritual Culture (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1931); Therkel Mathiassen, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921-1924. Volume 4: Archaeology of the Central Eskimos I: Descriptive Part (Copenhagen: Gyldenhal, 1927); Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921-1924. Material Culture of the Central Eskimos (Copenhagen: Gyldenhal, 1928). 2 Freuchen, Eskimos, 417. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid, 419. On this page, I accidentally crushed a small insect living between the pages. I didn’t know it was there because I didn’t imagine anything living between the pages. When I learned that something was living there between the pages, it was already a stain—a stain right over the letter “c” of the word catastrophe. It’s still there. 5 Ibid, 441.

xi discouraged at the changes I see and yearning for a return to times that are past, I look forward to the day when the Arctic will help man to realize his dreams of making the earth a more happy place in which to live.”6

Years later, Derrida is speaking to Stiegler and will tell us that, indeed, a return to the past is not quite available to us. Derrida says that “we are witnessing such a radical expropriation, deterritorialization, delocalization, dissociation of the political and the local, of the national, of the nation-state and the local, that the response, or rather the reaction, becomes: ‘I want to be at home, I want finally to be at home, with my own.’”7

This is a “reaction,” a desire for “singularity” that, without which, “there is no door nor any hospitality,” because the desire for hospitality, “(which exceeds both law and institution),” is not tied to what is closed in the forms taken by nationalism or fundamentalism or idiom.8 The desire for closedness, for the at-home, is the very condition of openness, or of the unconditional openness to which we are given. And so translation becomes necessary, and one “must invent an experience of translation which makes crossing possible without leveling and effacing the singularity of idiom.”9 The translation, the negotiation, and the transaction that this implies is both necessary and requires an invention “in the name of the unconditional, in the name of something that admits no transaction,” and that’s the difficulty. “The difficulty of thinking as ‘political’ difficulty.”10 We are subject to “the passage” and “all of [that] determines the starting

6 Ibid. 7 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, translated by Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 79. Note that Derrida says “reaction” rather than “response,” which marks an old “dogmatic” distinction between the human and the animal. See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 56-57. 8 Ibid, 81. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

xii up,”11 an inadequate translation of la mise en processus, what I would translate to the enablement. This new “temporality of technics” of enablement, Derrida would have called “rhythmics.”12 So describes the coming together of the world, in technics and economy, in civilization and nation, in time and rhythm.

This dissertation mostly departs from within the frame of change described above between Freuchen and Derrida. Freuchen imagined the Arctic as opening to the world, and indeed this has been the case—whether through climate change catastrophe or the promise of the future economy in natural resources. The enablement described later by

Derrida plots paths through the processes that have been told by Freuchen over the span of his Arctic expeditions. The massive shifts to and of technē call our attention to the ways in which rhythmicity persuades change, in economy and migration, to climate, and to border. The unconditional opening, revealed in the at-home, names the constitutive object of this study in the end and the opening. And so between the old Arctic explorer and the philosopher: the musing of the future.

What follows is a story about rhetoric. Yet throughout the course of this dissertation, questions are followed, uncovered, turned away from, and translated, but often without being posed directly. So as a prefatory remark, one question might return before beginning, a question that will come again: When do you tell a story that doesn’t happen?

The articles that make up the chapters of this dissertation are provided in whole as different versions from their corresponding articles to be determined.

11 Ibid, 72. 12 Ibid.

xiii Introduction

Contents:

1. Claim and Research Questions

2. Arctic

I. The End, The Opening

II. The Name

III. The Human

3. Rhetoric

4. Enablement

5. Granting

6. Passage

7. Chapter and Style Breakdown

1. Chapter 1: Arctic Rhetoric: The End of the Arctic, the Future of Baffin Bay

2. Chapter 2: Life and Death of the Body of the Seal

3. Chapter 3: printf(“Inuit”);

i. Chapter 3: Further Discussion

1. Claim and Research Questions

Arctic rhetoric is (in) the enablement of the granting of the passage.

The claim just provided is the synthesis of this dissertation’s contribution to the study of rhetoric and, in a different register, to Arctic studies more generally. Its form indicates

1 the rhetorical style and engagement of what follows. That is to say, as this dissertation

proceeds, its approach will have been to recursively demonstrate a returning-upon this

claim. The structure initially appears to be a tripartite construction—first the enablement,

then (of) the granting, finally (of) the passage—but as this introduction and, finally, this

dissertation, unfolds, the claim will be demonstratively recursive both as a theoretical

engagement, the what, and as a rhetorical style, the how. In other words, the claim is in

approach to a complex movement of displacement that, in returning in-to itself, casts

itself out in repetition. In more exact language, the claim is not composed of three parts.

Rather, it is the singular expression of a rhetorical movement, a style, emerging in a

particular historical context, that repeats and echoes.

All told, this dissertation advances a sustained engagement with contemporary

rhetoric in implication with the future of the Arctic, positing a theory of “Arctic rhetoric”

in response. Situated within a range of rhetorics influenced by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze,

and Nietzsche that theorize and situate, if not inhabit movement, change, and ecology, I

probe their conceits given in the rhetorical void produced: of “sovereignty”—as the

identity, the rhetor, the Cartesian subject, or a habilitating power that grants—alongside

the (non-) figuration of the Arctic. Two moves on this account: First, by spotlighting

three grounds, or “case studies,” of crisis in the Canadian Arctic1 impacting Inuit

peoples—(1) resource development projects in the era of climate change, (2) the seal hunt

debate and economy, and (3) the implementation of codification—I surface a secret

complicity, in turn, of co-implication, and of negotiation among these worldly, ecological, and radically finite rhetorics; second, in drawing these Arctic sites into encounter with

1 Hereafter I will move between references to the “Arctic,” “Canadian Arctic,” and “Inuit Nunangat” or “Nunangat,” the Inuit homeland situated across the Canadian nation-state: Nunavut, Inuvialuit Nunangit Sannaiqtuaq, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut.

2 rhetoricity, I derive Arctic rhetoric in relation to Inuit sovereignty more broadly, as a matter of rhetoric rather than international law. Part of the task, then, is the interrogation of the constitutive terms of sovereignty within the frame of the rhetorics that motivate the dissertation: (1) movement (rhythm), (2) translation (imitation), and (3) negotiation

(analogy). Thus, the dissertation is “situated” contextually in the Arctic, but with broader relevance to the current historical moment of economic and technological change and their crises to climate and habitability. Significantly, to date there has been no treatment of the Arctic in these contemporary rhetorics—raising a serious theoretical burden, as I will show—and, moreover, there have thus far only been extremely limited engagements with Inuit and the Arctic in the study of rhetoric in general both in Canada and the United

States.2 This dissertation, therefore, tentatively advances the first steps in approach to

2 A notable exception is the Canadian Journal of Communication, which has featured some of the articles of the #sealfie campaign that are treated in Chapter 2, and Katarina Soukup’s essay on Inuit technology-use and the Internet, which features in Chapter 3. However, there is no sustained treatment either of the Arctic or Inuit in the context of rhetorical theory or rhetorical studies anywhere in rhetoric journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Studies, Southern Communication Journal, Semiotica, Rhetorica, Communication Quarterly, KAIROS, or Rhetor. Moreover, there is no mention either of the Arctic or Inuit as a sustained topic in any of the rhetorical texts significantly featured and studied in this dissertation. While this dissertation acknowledges, and indeed follows, the significant work of American Indian rhetorics, again the Arctic and Inuit is a void in the realm of study. Thus, the Arctic and Inuit finds no mention in collections such as: Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination, edited by Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2018); Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics, edited by Lisa King, Rose Gubele, and Joyce Rain Anderson (Logan: State University of Utah Press, 2015); Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE, edited by Damián Baca and Victor Villaneuva (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic, edited by Ernest Stromberg (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). See also Randall A. Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991), 126–30; Scott Richard Lyons, “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do Indians Want from Writing?,” College Composition and Communication 51, no. 3 (2000), 447-468; John Sanchez and Mary E. Stuckey, “The Rhetoric of American Indian Activism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Communication Quarterly 48 (2000), 120-136; Mary E. Stuckey and John M. Murphy “By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism in North America,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25, no. 4 (2001), 73-98; Jason Edward Black, “The ‘Mascotting’ of Native America: Construction, Commodity, and Assimilation,” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2002), 605-622; ‘Remembrances of Removal: Native Resistance to Allotment and the Unmasking of Paternal Benevolence,” Southern Communication Journal 72, no. 2 (2007), 185-203; “Native Resistance Rhetoric and the Decolonization of American Indian Removal Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009), 66-88; Casey Ryan Kelly, “Rhetorical Counterinsurgency: The FBI and the American Indian Movement,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 10, no. 1 (2007), 223-258; “‘We Are Not Free’: The Meaning of Freedom in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson’s War on Poverty,” Communication Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2014), 455-473; Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009), 39-60; “American Indian Activism and Audience: Rhetorical Analysis of Leonard Peltier’s Response to Denial of Clemency,” Communication Reports 24, no. 2 (2011), 1-11.

3 “Arctic rhetoric.”

I have therefore named it, to repeat: the enablement of the granting of the passage.

While the claim isn’t composed of parts, this introduction will proceed piecemeal, briefly outlining the wagers of “The Arctic,” “rhetoric,” “enablement,” “granting,” and “passage.”

Doing so will variously engage with the theoretical stakes and historical contexts of the claim that animates this dissertation. As I will show, the claim is historical in the sense that Arctic rhetoric is of the ecological and economic movement of Western modernity

(in) to the Arctic, and the claim is rhetorical in the sense that Arctic rhetoric is of translation, misreading, image, persuasion, and in practice. Taken together, the claim the enablement of the granting of the passage is a matter of the future, and thus a question of spacetime. Nevertheless, the connections that obtain from the claim are privileged over the immediacy of clarity or a relation to an uncontroversial, historical, or objective correctness. This is the first and significant way in which the claim that animates this dissertation, and returns over and over again, is in conversation with Inuit philosophy3 in the Nunangat. As interviews with Inuit elders have attested, traditional Inuit knowledge places little value on objectivity, is produced in “relational terms,” and demands an awareness of the context in which it was produced.4 But in making this claim about Inuit

3 I’m using the term “philosophy” here in a risky way. The word “epistemology” was equally available. Conversely, so was the term Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, “traditional knowledge,” or “what Inuit have always known to be true,” which features in several different ways in what follows. Yet I use the word “philosophy” because it puts into tension all the philosophy I will come upon. At the end of Deleuze and Guattari’s final book together, they argue that philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it (Philosophy, 218). Am I saying here that Inuit philosophy is Western philosophy’s nonphilosophical other? No. Rather, because the philosophy that animates this dissertation is given to a motivating force of that philosophy, I use the term philosophy, like rhetoric, to signify the relation of sharing to the “in” of its opening. It is “Inuit philosophy” for the sake of this dissertation, but not the for the sake of. itself Joe Karetak and Frank Tester have already argued, I will repeat, that IQ is “more than a philosophy” (Inuit, 3). See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Joe Karetak and Frank Tester, “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Truth and Reconciliation,” in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known To Be True, edited by Joe Karetak et al. (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 1-19. 4 Saullu Nakasuk, et al., Interviewing Inuit Elders: Introduction, Vol.b 1, edited y Jarich Oosten and Frédéric Laugrand (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 1999), 9-10.

4 traditional knowledge, and citing it, I have performed an instance of a kind of knowledge

production that is of little value to the knowledge it references. Therefore, my claim

about Arctic rhetoric is in a sense already too general and given to a persistent objectivity, and, moreover, threatens to lack the objective clarity a claim strives for in the context of which it is written. Thematically, epistemologically, the claim is in tension, appearing between points—would this mean it is in the middle?

With this we have come upon a significant question. In fact, a relatively common concern for those texts engaged both with the Arctic and of Inuit, and indeed in the study of rhetoric more generally. Take for example Emilie Cameron’s claim that Qablunaat5 are

“accustomed,” no doubt in several different registers, to naming, characterizing, and analysing Inuit struggles, “and we are practised at doing so from the privileged position of neutral, reliable, compassionate witnesses.”6 Keavy Martin expresses a similar insight

at the close of her crucial and timely book in the still relatively nascent study of Inuit

literature,7 reminding that the protocol to speak from experience, or innusirmingnik unikkaat—stories based on personal experience8—“is a hard one to keep in this line of work,” in writing, in research, postulating, theorizing, citing, claiming.9 Given that this inheritance is the case, Cameron argues that the task would not to be to “direct our

5 Qablunaat, qablunaaq, qallnaat, qallunaaq are various Inuktut translations of “White people.” In this dissertation, I privilege the term qallunaat, as it is most often used in the texts I engage most significantly with. 6 Emilie Cameron, Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015), 185. 7 Robin McGrath’s 1985 dissertation “Canadian Eskimo Literature: The Development of a Tradition” deserves special mention here for being the first sustained study of Inuit print literature, in her words, “from his own perspective” (1). She opens with a striking prefatory note: “From Samuel Hearne’s agonized account of the massacre at Bloody Falls, through to Purdy’s lament for the legendary extinct Dorsets and Richler’s satiric decapitation of the incomparable Atuk, Canadian literature abounds with admirable Eskimos who are also, incidentally, dead” (ibid). See Robin McGrath, “Canadian Eskimo Literature: The Development of a Tradition,” doctoral dissertation, The University of Western Ontario (1983). See also Robin McGrath, Canadian Inuit Literature: The Development of a Tradition (Ottawa: National Museums Canada, 1984). 8 Keavy Martin, Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012), 154. 9 Ibid, 121.

5 attention to identifying and solving the problems Inuit face,” any more than to cultivate a

personal exceptionalism, but rather to “critically interrogate” and “remake” what she calls

“our shared relations, not just interpersonally but also institutionally, legally, structurally,

and materially.”10 This means unlearning of all kinds, but most certainly of certainty.

Knowledge doesn’t need to be true to be “materially consequential,” because what

matters is is “what it does, what makes it possible and how it participates in ordering the

‘mixed way things happen’.”11 On the one hand, Cameron has named some of the central conceits of this dissertation, as we will see. On the other hand, she has issued a challenge that has resounded through many “layers” of Arctic studies for a long time. For example, between the 1950s and 1970s the field known as “Eskimology” was significantly changing from the anthropological gaze it had inherited from Franz Boas. This change broadly names the shift from “acculturation theory”12 to “adaptation theory.”13 Broadly

speaking, acculturationists, responding to early ethnographic accounts of Inuit harmony

and balance with the land, argued for the unstoppable movement toward what Vallee

called “Kabloonamiut”14: the move away from the model Inuit who still practiced a

traditional lifestyle, what he named “Nunamiut,”15 into the copy, the Kabloonamiut, the

10 Cameron, Far, 186. 11 Ibid, 187. 12 See for example: Robert Murphy and Julian Steward, “Tappers and Trappers: Parallel Process in Acculturation,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 4, no. 4 (1956): 335-355; William Wilmott, The Eskimo Community at Port Harrison, P.Q., Canada, Ottawa, Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, NCRC Report (1961); Frank Vallee, Kabloona and Eskimo in the Central Keewatin (Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1967); Frank Vallee, Derek Smith, and Joseph Cooper, “Contemporary Canadian Inuit,” Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 5: Arctic, edited by David Damas (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1984): 662-675. 13 William B. Kemp, “The Flow of Energy in a Hunting Society,” Scientific American 224, no. 3 (1971): 104-115; George Wenzel, “Sealing at Clyde River, N.W.T.: A Discussion of Inuit Economy,” Études/Inuit/Studies 13, no. 1 (1989): 3-22; “Sharing, Money, and Modern Inuit Subsistence: Obligation and Reciprocity at Clyde River, Nunavut,” The Social Economy of Sharing: Resource Allocation and Modern Hunter-Gatherers, edited by George W. Wenzel, Grete Hovelsrud-Broda, Nobuhiro Kishigami (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2000), 61-85. 14 Vallee, Kabloona, 139. 15 Ibid, 136.

6 image of an irrepressible change, the “emergence of a socio-economic class system”16 that promised to end traditional Inuit life. Three years after Vallee’s influential text,

Charles C. Hughes responded with a highly debated article describing a fundamental shift, not only to individual components of Inuit life, but to what he called its “transactive structure,” the “recurring pattern of articulated elements of behavior and situation.”17 In

Hughes’ extremely detailed account, the Kabloonamiut transition wasn’t just assured (no less observable), but ontological. Scholars subscribing to acculturationist research found themselves repeating what nineteenth-century Moravian and Anglican missionaries would often proclaim about Inuit, that the “adoption of Western technology, clothing, and housing was considered the very proof of the decline of Inuit culture,”18 or, as Diamond

Jenness called it, the buckling of Inuit culture.19 The shift to adaptationist research in the

1970s and 1980s centred on the ecology and subsistence of Inuit peoples, stressing the fundamental capacity of Inuit culture to change,20 though, as Pamela Stern points out, this was often at the expense of the political, colonial, economic, and gendered reality of everyday life of Inuit peoples.21

16 Ibid, 142. 17 Charles Campbell Hughes, “Under Four Flags: Recent Culture Changes Among the Eskimos,” Current Anthropology 6, no. 1 (1965), 53. 18 Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, Inuit Shamanism and Christianity: Transitions and Transformations in the Twentieth Century (Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012), 4. For an excellent summary of the acculturation and adaptation debates in Inuit studies, and the emergence of “subsistence” studies, see especially George Wenzel, “‘Nunamiut’ or ‘Kabloonamiut’: Which ‘Identity’ Best Fits Inuit (And Does It Matter)?,” Études/Inuit/Studies 25, no. 1-2 (2001), 37-52; “Inuit and Modern Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence,” Études/Inuit/Studies 37, no. 2 (2013), 181-200. 19 Diamond Jenness, Eskimo Administration: II (Montreal, 1964), 11-12. Having said that, it’s important to note that while ethnographic and anthropological scholarship has increasingly come to recognize the “adaptation” and “subsistence” frame as a more meaningful and politically useful tool for theoretical inquiry and political advocacy, the acculturation narrative persists—sometimes usefully. For example, the Qikiqtani Truth Commission Final Report suggests that the decision “to give up the traditional way of life was almost never an easy one, and once made, it proved to be irreversible.” “QTC Final Report: Achieving Saimaqatiqiingiq,” Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Thematic Reports and Special Studies, 1950-1975 (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, 2013), 17, emphasis mine. 20 James Ford, et al., “Adapting to the Effects of Climate Change on Inuit Health,” American Journal of Public Health 104, no. 3 (2014), 9. 21 Thus the needed introduction, first, of Inuit “cultural studies” into ethnography, anthropology, and “Inuit Studies” in general, coincident with the Inuit political mobilization in the 1970s, to which I will return. The cultural studies

Thus, as Cameron has argued, the necessity to approach “the relations that stories

trace and make visible to us, what they authorize us to do, and what they allow us to

forget” is central. Cameron herself was writing in the context of the now mythical Bloody

Falls Massacre story, one that she has contested as being “fundamentally a Qablunaaq

story” and, being such, both links to the ways that the telling is the means through which

“our stories are embedded in much larger structures and patterns of relation” and how

those relations link into the bodies, lands, and livelihoods that constitute the fate of

northern peoples.22 The task is to “draw on what we know in our relations, and for that

knowledge to change how we become with others, not prescriptively, but in the sense of

careful, attentive, relational emergence.”23 There must be no repetition of the silencing,

disappearance, or reproduction of stories and rhetorics that cast into non-recognition and

disregard. Martin, to this end, has looked to the principle of inuuqatigiittiarniq, of living

together in a good way, which broadly overlaps with what Cameron has suggested of the

task: primordial relationships to land and family, to the inner spirit (Pijitsirniq) of identity

as the building of knowledge, and in, of, and to the “common goal” (Piliriqatigiinigiq) of

community.24 The goal, in line with Nunavut’s Task Force on Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, is

to form a “land bridge,” a seeking between and in pursuit of cultures that, one day, will

not need to cross the bridge.25

If this is taken seriously, any rhetoric “of” and “in” relation to Inuit peoples

moment of Inuit studies put stress on identity, representation, and traditional knowledge. At the time of writing, however, Stern posited the need for a new direction of “critical” Inuit studies that looked back into the production of research as such—what is it, why is it happening, does it re-create metanarratives? See Pamela Stern, “From Area Studies to Cultural Studies to a Critical Inuit Studies,” Critical Inuit Studies: An Anthology of Contemporary Arctic Ethnography, edited by Pamela Stern and Lisa Stevenson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 253-265. 22 Cameron, Far, 173-174. 23 Ibid, 191. 24 Martin, Stories, 122. 25 Ibid, 119.

8 therefore demands, as a reception, the terms of relationality to community and

environment as a challenge to what is known to be the case. Already this would appear to

be in significant conversation with many of the rhetorical theorists and theories that I

attend to in detail in this dissertation. Take for example Thomas Rickert’s theory of ambience26 as a rhetorical “attunement” to world, an ecological theory of rhetoric

following in Heidegger’s tracks (or “paths,” as Heidegger himself might have preferred).

Rickert engages in a series of constitutive re-readings of foundational and ancient

rhetorical concepts like invention and kairos, but it might be useful to briefly stage the

reading of the chōra, the Platonic interactive ground of matter and activity.27 Chōra is

reconceptualized by ambience as a “displaced place”28 that is itself not only dis-placed but displaces place through the subjects of its inhabitance, both materially and psychologically,29 or, as he puts it: minds “at once embodied … and dispersed into the

environment itself, and hence no longer autonomous ... but composites of intellect, body,

information, and scaffoldings of material artefacts.”30 The chōra, therefore, is what

“presents us with the limits of meaning and human artifice,” and has withdrawal “built into origin, creation, and fabrication.”31 On this account, the chōra is the “dynamic

circulation” of “revealing and concealing,” of the “‘infomaterial’ matrix”32 that is

world—and, as such, of rhetoricity, which “reduces” the representation of human

automaticity into the origin of withdrawal that is the enablement of intent, and of

26 Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). As I expand significantly on this and related rhetorics in Chapter 1, I will give only an indication here. 27 Ibid, 42. 28 Ibid, 71. 29 Ibid, 42. 30 Ibid, 43. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.

9 invention itself.33 Knowledge, in this formula, is distributed in, emergent of, and

withdraws back into the environment. The seat of the rhetor thus displaced, the origin and

function of knowledge, as episteme, is intensive, immanent, and ontological. This opens rhetoric to a world where relations are given in our mutually shared “complex,” one that

“precedes the symbolic” familiar to the Inuit landscapes just described, and means that rhetoric itself “depends on neither knowledge nor consciousness,” but rather is “given to emerge prior to them.” What Rickert calls “worldly affect,” what gives to rhetoricity as what gives to being in relation, “hollows out in advance what rhetoric will have come to be,” bringing us forward “just as it awaits us, not as the new, not as a marker distinguishing us from what has come before,” but what discloses us in the world as

“what has been sent forward and continues in its sending.”34 Such is the promise of these

rhetorics.

This is an especially complex promise given the exponential growth of discourse of

climate change emergency, catastrophe, and what has been called the Anthropocene. The

Anthropocene and climate change rhetorics have been plotted through the end of the

world and the breakdown of the future,35 of capitalism,36 and of civilization, the rise of

Gaia37 and “the coming barbarism,”38 the “shared sense” catastrophe universally

33 Ibid, 73. 34 Ibid, 284-285. 35 “Earth-system processes and associated thresholds … if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change … The evidence so far suggests that, as long as the thresholds are not crossed, humanity has the freedom to pursue long-term social and economic development.” The evidence for this, in 2009, was already suggesting otherwise, and, in the decade since, has only been reaffirmed. See Jonan Rockström, et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (2009), available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a. 36 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). 37 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime, translated by Cathy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 38 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, translated by Andrew Goffey (New Jersey: Open Humanities Press, 2015).

10 distributed without apprehension,39 and the many of ends of many worlds already ending and ended.40 In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has concluded that

“global warming, growing economic inequities, and conflicts over large-scale economic development projects” demonstrates an “emerging consensus” that the “land that sustains all of us must be protected for future generations.”41 On the global stage, the International

Panel on Climate Change have recently written that “enabling conditions” to global temperature increases to 1.5ºC “may be considered through the unifying lens of the

Anthropocene, acknowledging profound, differential but increasingly geologically significant human influences on the Earth system” that “emphasises the global interconnectivity of past, present and future human–environment relations.”42 In a now well-cited book, Donna Haraway has called this historical moment, of “urgent time,” one which calls for avoiding “making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations.”43 The world’s end is not in sight, despite the mass extinction event that has been called for, and thus it is the present that is “both more

39 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009), 221. See also Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capitalism: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 42 (2014), 1-23. 40 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 108. They argue, in fact, that Indigenous peoples “have something to teach us when it comes to apocalypses,” in that the world has already ended in 1492 (104). To this end, Kathryn Yusoff also agrees, suggesting that race is a “matter” of structural capitalist development (Billion, 18) and that the production of “Global-World-Space” has, in effect, already ended many worlds, effected many anthropecenes (21). See A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 41 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Honouring the Truth, Reconciling For the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada” (Ottawa, 2015), 301. 42 M.R. Allen, et al., “Framing and Context,” Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C Above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (2018), 52. 43 Donna J. Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1.

serious and more lively.” Thus, we “become-with each other or not at all.”44 In the context of the Arctic, climate change rhetoric has signaled the rise of “the end of the

Arctic.”45 The end of the Arctic convenes the photographers in search of skinny polar bears, documentarians to highlight the powerlessness of communities to battle against

Goliath oil corporations and oil spills, new animals and plants, food sovereignty struggles and social media campaigns and hashtags and rhetorics of sharing in relation to the planetary. The end of the world is plotted through the end of the Arctic, the first victim, the great promise of what casts itself forward and promises to reach all human being in habitation.46

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is a strong voice in this frame. In her memoir, she notes that the dire metaphors of climate change “have already become a very literal reality.”47 Not only is the world changed,48 not only are food, and housing, and communities at risk— from colonialism as much as the climate49—but the wisdom of the land also threatens to disappear with it. “And when I say we, I do not mean only Inuit,” she writes. “It is true,

[Inuit] are already among the first to be devastated by climate change, but we are not the

44 Ibid, 4. We might note here that Haraway’s book only rarely evokes Inuit peoples, and one of them is in the final chapter of the book, a speculative fiction evoking the dead from an imagined future. There, in that future, from the fictive evocation, returns Tanya Tagaq, worthy of memory (164-165). We might usefully recall McGrath’s claim at this moment. Tagaq, for her part, will return, answering to a different death, in Chapter 2. 45 Already in 1992, Edward Struzik had prophesized this discourse. See Edward Struzik, “The End of Arctic,” Equinox 66 (November/December 1992), 76–94. Over a decade later, he would repeat his claim: “it’s clear that the Arctic we know is coming to an end, and a new Arctic is taking over.” I address Struzik in far more detail in Chapter 1, but Struzik’s essay begins with the unusual sight of snowy owls in British Columbia—there where they should not be. This is a common rhetorical tactic for Struzik, who is now making the same claims about fire and soot (2018) where it would not be. In a world populated by shareable portents and newsworthy fortune-tellers, an irruption of snowy owls in British Columbia, further south and in larger number than usual, and photos of skinny polar bears in Nunavut, speak from the future of climate change. When I say they speak from the future of climate change, a community implies itself. Something speaks. Who hears? This is a significant topic for the dissertation that follows. 46 This is the subject of Chapter 1. 47 Sheila Watt-Cloutier, The Right To Be Cold: One Woman’s Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2. 48 Ibid, 1. 49 Ibid, 3-4.

12 only ones.” Inuit are not the only ones because the “common atmosphere”50 is where

everything is connected and, thus, the Arctic is the great “air conditioner of the world.”51

The conclusion follows: the “future of Inuit is the future of the rest of the world—our

home is a barometer for what is happening to the rest of our entire planet.”52 Only the

“fear” of economic decline prevents the largest polluting nations from reducing their role

in climate-related change, and the related Arctic “opportunities” presented by the end of

the Arctic are, for Inuit, for Watt-Cloutier, the means to watching an “inheritance melt

away.”53 And so Watt-Cloutier’s book is a continuation of her work to link human rights discourse into the climate change debate, a topic to which this Introduction will return, thereby opening the Arctic to the shared habitability of the planet into what she calls the

“right to be cold.”54 By putting a “human face” on the climate change debate, Watt-

Cloutier argues that what she calls the “human-rights approach”55 dislocates the dry technicality and economics of the debate back into the realm of the human. “If we cannot save our frozen Arctic,” she asks, “how can we hope to save the rest of the world?”56 It is

rhetoric that emerges from and discloses world, which issues into the being we all share

as being, as finitude, as risk, and seems to respond to her question: the rhetoric that we

are speaks, naming “us” in relation. It is in approach to the extreme tension of Watt-

Cloutier’s request and rhetorical response—both given of the future—that this

dissertation moves, and names: “Arctic rhetoric.”

50 This is the “common” atmosphere that grants Harraway the citation to Sila, which will return as a question of sovereignty in Chapter 1. See Haraway, Staying, 86. 51 Ibid, 4. 52 Ibid, 5, emphasis mine. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid, 6. 55 Ibid, 7. 56 Ibid, 10.

13 2. Arctic

With what follows, my goal will not be to extensively reproduce in extreme detail the history of the Nunangat or of Canadian Arctic sovereignty.57 Rather, I seek the constitutive approaches to Arctic rhetoric: the end, the opening, the name, the human.

I. The End, the Opening

Robert McGhee58 argued that the Arctic was always first a concept then a place,59 “held” in the minds of the southerners who, inspired and compromised by that very inspiration, failed to recognize the “multi-layered human reality,” from the resilience of the plants all the way to the “ingenious, resourceful natives.”60 So the “sea ice and midnight sun, the whales and walrus and reindeer, the flaring aurora and the endless winter night are viewed,” in the context of a book about the human,61 “only as scenes and players in the human history of the polar zone.”62 These are quite fateful words. McGhee is right to note the flux of mythoi from which the Canadian Arctic imagination emerges like Venus, virgin and open, as the “zone” of the polar scene giving way to the “human communities”

57 Shelagh D. Grant has offered indispensible texts on this account. See especially Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2010) and Sovereignty or Security?: Government Policy in the Canadian North, 1936-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994). Future research on “Arctic rhetoric” ought to significantly and systematically engage with the historical and archival history of Arctic sovereignty in all four Inuit regions of the Nunangat. 58 McGhee’s own “call” to the Arctic emerged in the 1950s with Farley Mowat and the “plight” of the Inuit. “The Canadian artic is, today, a virgin wilderness with its chief resources still buried under ice and glacial rocks,” Mowat concluded his People of the Deer. “The time is coming when this will no longer be true. The time is coming when—as the Russians already have done—we will be living, working, and enriching ourselves in the sole frontier area which remains to us. It will not be casual exploitation of surface resources, as it is now. It will be a long-term development” (317). This is of course not the plight that Mowat was referencing, not quite, but it is perhaps the more contemporary, more scholarly object of “plight” today. Farley Mowat, The People of the Deer (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1952). 59 Thus returns the first echo, and a concern of Chapter 3. I will return to this point once we reach Rhetoric. 60 Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9. 61 A constitutive approach emerges, the human, but earlier than intended—to return. 62 Ibid, 10.

14 that constitute but a part of the “global history of human endeavour,” suggesting its own conclusion waiting for it in advance. “This Arctic,” he writes, “not so much a region as a dream,” the last imaginary place.63 Maybe it’s true after all, and Quentin Meillassoux might be quite sympathetic to this claim,64 that the Arctic fascination is linked to the great

“Age” of ice, of Pleistocene facticity, of prehistory, of what links to what is there for us now but only in wait: as those most ancient fossils on the shores of Lake Superior, or the ghost of Glacial Lake Iroquois that haunts the contour of Lake Ontario in retreat, or further north to the v-cuts etched into bone in the Bluefish Caves of the Gwich’in territory of the Yukon, where migration and retreat whisper the name “ice” to the human being. The same whisper that persuades the geologist and the paleontologist and the archeologist that “human being” is the given of this very retreat, of the withdrawal of ice, back into what feeds the tributaries moving far into the old libraries of the south: the holding of fire, the emergence of technē, the rise of culture, the birth of civilization. And if this is true, the end of the Great Ice Age echoes familiarly today, for it seems name something the human being had heard so long ago, before birth, half-remembered in the womb, the soft murmur of song and story. The end of the Ice Age appears as the withdrawal; the withdrawal echoing the opening of what we all share, and all that describes the ways in which abrupt periods and cycles of climatic change persuade the

63 Ibid. 64 “How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life—posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?” (9-10). If I may boldly summarize Meillassoux’s now long-since debated text and conclusions without recourse to the words “correlationism” or “finitude,” for that would mean too long a detour into translations of these terms that won’t quite return, the “how” is to absolutize, rather to “re-absolutize” (126) the scope of mathematical inquiry (“facticality”) without lapsing into metaphysics. Meillassoux would have us maintain the infinite, which we are shown but cannot express (I return to this in Chapter 3), by “grasping” what makes mathematical propositions logical and possible in the first place. Even if there’s no possibility of expressing a Set of sets, for example, this non- expressible totality isn’t the point. The (arche-) fossil, and scientific statements in general, already derive an unconditional necessity (127). The seeking is already derivation, not of metaphysical or scientific hypothesis, but of the arena where the totalizable is the condition of ontic or ontological statements in the first place. For Meillassoux, this is where philosophy begins—in the Age of (habitation) escape. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2011).

contour of worldly relation. The rhythmic time of the ancient recession of the ice, of

Ages older than human script, rhythmed with (in) the cutting into bone, into wood, into

snow, into rock, into earth, and into the wisdom that must have been the first cut in the

first instance—the enablement of the old in the new.

“The Arctic,” thus, the enablement of the “Age” of human being in relation, as the granting of the story of glacial retreat north, to the passage of its withdrawal into mythos.

Thus the history of the Arctic is enabled in this way, for us, as the revealing and withdrawal of what grants passage: “Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death— our life, our happiness.”65 It couldn’t be otherwise, then, that in her grand history of

Arctic sovereignty in North America, Grant “defines the parameters” of her inquiry by the first opening with the Great Ice Age, dated to 50,000 years ago and ending roughly

25,000 years ago. The latter part of the age allowed for the passage from Asia to Siberia and America due to reduced sea levels, “the early ancestors of the Amerindians,” by what is often called the “land bridge.”66 The land bridge is the granting of the passage between

Asia and North America, where “the first inhabitants” cross into history. Scientific

“discovery,” Grant suggests, “has added greatly to our knowledge of how climate change caused adaptations of ancient flora and fauna and, in some instances, their extinction.”

New discoveries on this account “appear to confirm the theory that such changes are part of a cyclical pattern of warming and cooling periods that eventually led to the arrival, adaptation and later demise of the first humans to inhabit the Arctic.”67 By 320 BCE,

65 Fredrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 127. 66 Grant, Polar, 34. Recall the metaphor of the Nunavut Task Force on Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, who, like Martin, seek the land bridge—across traditional knowledge and contemporary nation-state territorial governance, or story and literature. 67 Ibid, 62. In 1985, the Geological Survey of Canada began research into the subtropical Arctic. In its first report is the “discovery” of fossil “remains” of ancient trees. The fossil tree in the Arctic: does this give the indication of the roots

Pytheas of Massilia, the “first Arctic explorer,” sailing north for tin and amber, continues

north until, threatened by unfamiliar stars and the incomprehensibility of the freezing

ocean, finds the “Thule” people there waiting for him to be named. There with the Thule,

he bestows from the relation of the sky to the land, what lies beneath Ursa Majoris, the

Great Bear, ἄρκτος (árkos) what follows: ἀρκτικός (arktikós) the Arctic. In this sense, the

story of the Arctic and the crossing of the land bridge is literal, as a passage between

continents that waits for Pytheas to name ἀρκτικός and be re-cited forever afterwards,

and in that becoming of the passage, the analogy, a rhetorical passage of the Arctic.

The emergence of the modern Arctic as a land of withholding, of ice and

impenetrability, emerges with the “Little Ice Age,” the cooling period having variable

regional effects around Europe between 1250 and 1850 CE. In the fourteen century—the

opening of what the Royal Commission called the closing of the oceanic barrier and the

beginning of the end—Inuit peoples experienced the cooling trend as an ecological

persuasion to migrate to warmer climates. McGhee has elsewhere said that it was the

Little Ice Age made it impossible for many of the Thule people to maintain their

lifestyles,68 which perhaps explains the “penchant for mobility.”69 Prior to the Little Ice

Age, there was Viking passage from Norway to Greenland by the late ninth century, and around 1000 CE, Leif Erikson’s passage to Vínland (where grapes grow wild), probably in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to Markland (forest land) in modern day Newfoundland, and

Helluland (slab land), on southern Baffin Island, all in the name of King Olaf of

of the tree in the Arctic, the old philosophical metaphor, the universal root merely fossilized in the old frozen soil, the return of the old tree? Such as it is there are various betrayals of metaphor in the Arctic. We might even say that the Arctic betrayal is the very striving force of the trope. Was it not the anticipation of the betrayal that figured the Arctic as a necessary and ongoing concern for the Government of Canada? 68 See especially Robert McGhee, “When the Climate Changes,” Ancient People of the Arctic (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2001), 106-119. 69 McGhee, Imaginary, 37.

Norway.70 In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese dominated the seas and “discovery,”

establishing settlements in “Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands and the

Azores,” the latter of which allowed for fishing off the coast of Newfoundland and

Labrador, in competition with the English and the Basques.71 The end of the Great Ice

Age thus opens the passage from Cabot and Columbus, to Pope Alexander VI’s Bulls of

Donation in 1493 recognizing the right of Spanish claims to discovered lands in the west, and protecting Portuguese discovery in the east; the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal, dividing the lands along a line at 60° W latitude, giving Portugal the right to Africa, Newfoundland, and Brazil, and Spain’s control over the Magellan Straits of

South America72; to the English search for a sea route through the Arctic between 1496

and 155373; François I’s persuasion to Pope Clement VII to alter the papal bulls to allow for discovery of the “new world,” and so the commission in 1534 sending Cartier to the shores of the Gaspé to stake the cross, and back to the St. Lawrence in 1541 to establish the colony74; to the 1558 ascension of Elizabeth I to the throne of England and the Eighty

Years War with Spain, in part to interrupt Spanish trade in the Caribbean, and the look

north by Martin Frobisher and the Muscovy Company, already sending ships in search of

70 Grant, Polar, 42; McGhee, Imaginary, 81-94. Norse inhabitation was interrupted by what they called skraelings, which Inuit name Tuniit, and that archeologists and historians call either the “Palaeo-Eskimo” or “Dorset” culture, understood as inhabitants roughly between 500 BCE to roughly 1400 CE. See Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Skraelings: Clashes in the Old Arctic (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, 2014). See also: Robert McGhee, “Ivory for the Sea Woman: The Symbolic Attributes of a Prehistoric Technology,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 1 (1977), 141-149; “Meetings between Dorset Culture Palaeo-Eskimos and Thule Culture Inuit: Evidence from Brooman Point,” Fifty Years of Arctic Research: Anthropological Studies from Greenland to Siberia, edited by Rolf Gilberg and Hans Christian Gulløv (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, Department of Ethnography, 1997), 209-213; Ulla Odgaard, “Palaeo-Eskimoic Shamanism,” North Atlantic Studies 4, no. 1-2 (2001), 25-30. 71 Grant, Polar, 57. See also “Saladin d’Anglure, “The Route to China: Northern Europe’s Arctic Delusions,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (1984), 446 –52. 72 See Hendrik Spruyt, Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 176-203. 73 Grant, Polar, 58. 74 See Henry Percival Biggar, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

the northeastern passage by 1553, to stake the first claim of Arctic sovereignty75; to the

publication of Gerardus Mercator’s map of the world in 1569, revealing for the first time

the possibility of northern sea routes bridging Europe and Asia76; to the rise of private investor merchants in the seventeenth century, forming the Northwest Passage Company

(originally the Company for the Discovery of the North-West Passage) which, in 1615 and 1616, sends Captain Robert Bylot and pilot William Baffin north to Hudson Bay, charting Baffin Island and Lancaster Sound, and finding the passage blocked by ice77; to

the Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648; and the arrival of

Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers in London in 1668, seeking

financial backing for an expedition to Hudson’s Bay.78 After two voyages there, returning with an extremely valuable burden of furs, among them beaver furs,79 and a notion that the Bay would open to the northwest and bypass the French colonists along the St.

Lawrence, Prince Rupert establishes the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into the Hudson’s Bay, which is granted a charter in 1670 by his cousin, King Charles II, over all lands draining into Bay, what becomes known as Rupert’s Land into which enters, finally, the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The rest, we might say, is history.80 Thus, once there is a “history” of Arctic

sovereignty for North America, in North America, of North America, Grant argues that it

75 Grant, Polar, 62-68. 76 Ibid, 10. 77 Ibid, 71-72. 78 Ibid, 76-78. 79 For an authoritative history of the beaver, and the Canadian fur trade, see Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956). Ultimately, Innis suggests that the trade relations between early explorers, Indigenous peoples, the circuitries of capital and industrial development, the control of fur trade routes, and the development of necessary trade relationships were responsible for the boundaries and borders of Canada, the development of Québec, and Confederation. He issues a now famous claim: “It is no mere accident that the present Dominion coincides roughly with the fur-trading areas of northern North America…. The present Dominion emerged not in spite of its geography but because of it” (392-393, emphasis mine). 80 This history has arguably defined all of Canadian politics since before Confederation. See the indispensible five volume Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996), accessed at: http://www.bac- lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/royal-commission-aboriginal-peoples/Pages/final-report.aspx.

“belongs to more than just the Inuit,”81 or to the colonial powers of Britain, Canada, the

United States, and Denmark. Of course this must be true, it must span in-to the Dutch,

Russians, Portuguese, French, and Spanish Basques, all those who, “vying for control over the Arctic seas of the Old and New Worlds,” were themselves dependent on a number of interrelated conditions: “the effect of European wars and internal conflicts, adoption of new technologies, accessibility of resources and market demand; the

Protestant Reformation; as well as changes in economic and political power within the global community.”82 As is already known, “overriding all else” during the late seventeenth century, the enablement of the interrelations was the “event beyond anyone’s control,” the Little Ice Age, enabled in advance by the end of the Great Ice Age, which

“reopened the waters of Davis Strait” and produced massive shifts in economic and military power, including the reorientation of objectives and priorities for global resource and territorial acquisition to come. This claim of belonging is an essential claim to grasp.

In what sense does belonging coexist with this definition of sovereignty—in this case

“for” the Arctic? Largely, this constitutes the feature of the historical claim that leads to sovereignty as a matter of international law and the international courts. But first those

“inhabitants” of the Arctic, those “first inhabitants” mythologized by Pytheas and

Frobisher, Parry and Lyon,83 Barrows, and Franklin, first needed the name.

II. The Name

Before the encroachment of Law and hospitals, roughly between the period of 1920 and

81 Grant, Polar, 56. 82 Ibid, 58-59. 83 Willem Rasing begins his history of Igloolik with Captain Parry and Captain Lyon looking out onto its shoreline at 9AM on a Tuesday in July 1822, seeing its “inhabitants” for the first time (13). This history inaugurates the long steady decline of Igloolik traditions, nature, and peoples. See Willem Rasing, Too Many People: Contact, Disorder, Change in an Inuit Society, 1822-2015 (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2015).

1940, the church made the question of the atiq (the name and the namesake) a problem in

wait.84 As Laugrand and Oosten have shown, the name “played a central part in maintaining the continuity of society” by drawing Inuit, “the living ones who are here,” into relation with the dead.85 This “transfer of names” helped maintain the social order of

the community, in this “relational identity” of the name, in reference to the ancestor of

the namesake, both constituting the fabric of individual in the socius and the continued

sociality of the ancestors given again in the presence of Inuit,86 returned as skills, abilities,

appearances. The name is the structure of “a society that is organized in terms of time and

space, and at the same time transcends that structure.”87 Ergo the introduction of

Christian names “did not really affect the old system, as Inuit continued to identify,” and still do, “with their ancestors through names and integrated the old traditions into the new naming system.”88 With the notable exception of Anglicans, the missionaries often didn’t

discourage or interrupt, strictly speaking, the continued expression of this tradition in the

giving of Christian names. As A. Barry Roberts puts it: “Over a period of time almost

everyone took such a baptismal name,” almost always with “modifications brought about

by Inuit difficulty with their pronunciation and with their translation into syllabic writing

script” and thus “there came about a proliferation of Pauls (Paulusi), Jessies (Siasi),

84 In Chapter 3, I offer an implicit discussion of atiq as it re-encounters the terms of identification and passage in code. While I don’t make any mention here of the inroads made by whalers, this is an important part of the interaction between Inuit and non-Inuit in the nineteenth century. For a strong history of this, see Dorothy Eber, When the Whalers Were Up North: Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic (Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996). Eber opens: “The ships that brought the future were the Elizabeth and the Larkins, both out of British ports” (3). While whalers had already been up north, none had managed to reach north into Lancaster Sound from the Davis Strait along Baffin Island until 1817, roughly coincident with the end and the opening just discussed. I return to the “future” of Baffin Bay and Davis Strait in Chapter 1. 85 Laugrand and Oosten, Shamanism, 127. 86 Ibid, 127-128. 87 Ibid, 198. This brings into conversation the concept of the tarniq, taken up in Chapter 3, which implies a “new cycle of birth and death” in a community that is marked by it. The “cycle of the tarniit,” as Laugrand and Oosten put it, is “anonymous and a-temporal. No one knows when and how a tarniq incarnates” (197). Names, on the other hand, “are not born and do not die; they are beyond death … thus the relations between names takes precedence over kinship relations” (ibid). Names can “only disappear by being forgotten” (ibid). 88 Ibid, 128.

Adams (Atami), Eves (Evie), Matthews (Matiusi), Marks (Markusi), Lukes (Lucasi),

Johns (Joanasi) and the like.”89 Inuit readily took on new names, as they always had, and

continued in their contextual and relational forms of address, using different names as

befit the encounter, context, and relation. But for the police and doctors, this became a

problem of pronunciation, alphabetization, and record. In 1929, Royal Canadian Mounted

Police (RCMP)90 Sergeant O.G. Petty first suggested to the federal government, to no avail, to standardize the spelling of Inuit names.

In 1932, Major D.L. McKeand of the Department of the Interior suggested a fingerprinting “experiment,” creating dossiers and files with the fingerprints and names of Inuit as a means of standardized identification. While he reported an “unqualified success” in this “experiment,”91 doctors stationed throughout the Arctic disagreed. Dr.

J.A. Bildfell, writing to Ottawa in 1933, cited an overcomplicated and only partial

accounting of fingerprinting, a task entirely left to the RCMP. It wasn’t until 1935 when

Dr. A.G. Mackinnon, stationed in Pangnirtung, suggested a different method in a letter to

the Department of the Interior. Christian names, he argued, had been of no help to the

identification of Inuit. “A good example of this,” he wrote, “is in the rather common

name of Ruth. The native cannot get his sounding mechanism around the letter R at the

first of the word. As a result different persons would write down the following when the

native gave the child's name, - Urootee, Olootee, Alootah, with other alterations along the

89 A. Barry Roberts, “Eskimo Identification and Disc Numbers: A Brief History,” Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (June 1975), 2. 90 It would be foolhardy to even attempt a history of the RCMP, once called the Northwest Mounted Police, in the Nunangat. For an excellent history which charts the shift of the police as guardians of Canadian Arctic sovereign occupancy and law, the fist and temper of gold rush arrivants, to federal, territorial, and municipal civil servants, including the oversight of relations between Inuit and traders, reporting on game conditions, and providing basic services, see William R. Morrison, Showing the Flag: The Mounted Police and Canadian Sovereignty in the North, 1894-1925 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1985). For the role of the RCMP in the mass killing of qimmit (sled dogs) between 1950 and 1970, see Qikiqtani Inuit Association, “Analysis of the RCMP Sled Dog Report,” Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Thematic Reports and Special Studies 1950–1975 (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, 2014). 91 Ibid, 4.

same line. To one who does not know them personally, this makes it rather difficult when

it comes to putting them in alphabetical order.”92 Thus, he concluded: “My humble

suggestion would be, that at each registration the child be given an identity disk on the

same lines as the army identity disk and the same insistence that it be worn at all times.”

The “novelty” of this form of material identification “would appeal to the natives” and,

moreover, would “make it possible for us all to start in and have our records the same for

the coming generation and would be available at all times.”93 When he received no response, he wrote again in 1936: “As far as the Eskimo is concerned, it does seem to me that this names business is of no great concern to them. They have got on nicely for a long time without cluttering up their minds with such details. They seem to be able to let each other know who they mean even though there are duplicates in the district and this duplicating seems to be increasing with the adoption of biblical names.”94 His appeal

would again be ignored. Also in 1935, A. E. Porsild made a bid for the introduction of the

“white man’s binominal system of names, compelling the head of each family” to select a

common name, which Diamond Jenness supported.95

In 1940, Major McKeand again brought up the question of identification, writing that some “system must be devised to get away from the increasing amount of confusion caused by bad spelling, introduction of Christian names, and other factors.”96 He proposed a system of linen cards enclosed in cellophane, imagining it to be the introduction of a “general licensing system” that would introduce Inuit to record keeping in general, as with the cataloguing of seen and killed animals. While this suggestion

92 Qtd in Roberts, 6. 93 Ibid. 94 Qtd in Roberts, 8. 95 Ibid, 10. 96 Qtd in Roberts, ibid.

never came into fruition, his letter was received and footnoted by R. A. Gibson, the

Deputy Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, suggesting that the identification

system could work at a cost-effective scale if the form took a circular identification disc

in the shape of a quarter, either sewn onto clothing or worn around the neck.97 Tasked with researching the possibility, Knead concurred with the circular disc method and, further, suggested the necessity for a “complete census of the Eskimo,” which, after a short debate in the Northwest Territories Council about the design of the disc, was carried out in 1941.98 In the years that followed, in 1943, the administration of the disc system was readily collapsing in on itself due to significant failures in distribution, with some communities receiving the discs and many others not, and no infrastructure to meaningfully resupply the discs when more were needed, to monitor who received what and when, and how to respond to reports that the discs were being discarded or destroyed by some communities.99 The administrative failure of the disc system led to McKnead’s involvement in a significant internal debate about the “administration of vital statistics,”100 arguing that unless there was “a separate division … charged with the sole

responsibility of identification discs and census, we are going to have endless

correspondence, multiplication of errors and, ultimately, chaos.”101 Part of the problem

was the impossibility to “visit” every community due to their “nomadic, non-tribal life,”

and so, he concluded, “decentralization of the administration of their affairs is essential if

their welfare is to be looked after intelligently.”102

In 1946, twenty years before Lester B. Pearson would become the Prime Minister

97 Ibid. 98 Ibid, 12-14. 99 Ibid, 16-19. 100 Ibid, 19. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid, 20.

of Canada, then serving as the Canadian Ambassador to the United States, he wrote in

Foreign Affairs that Canada, now more sober and understanding, was looking to the

Arctic “as a land of the future.”103 Allied victory in the Second World War meant that the

“new north” required an effective jurisdiction by the federal government. During the war,

in 1941, this meant a series of construction and monitoring projects for the Crimson

Route along the Qikiqtaaluk region: the Crystal Two runway, Frobisher Bay Air Force

Base, and the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, and, a year later, a weather station

built by the United States Air Corps.104 This is the centralization of what becomes known as Frobisher Bay, today Iqaluit, that is the granting of the future—in the forecasting, the warning, the scanning. William Rankin105 has situated this build-up with the emergence of what he calls geo-epistemology, the map as an extensive shift of representation.

Representation in 20th century cartography, as Rankin goes to pains to show, was a matter

of “scientific truth,”106 comprehensiveness, objectivity, neutrality—in other words, the goal of cartographic representation in the middle twentieth century was nothing less than the relation to world. Relation is never merely local to similarity but includes the movement of the relation to singularity, whether as “example,” Idea, category, or, as

Rankin has it, “the map—a singular, universal record of geographic fact that includes everything worthy of attention, and nothing more.”107 The onset of the Second World

War marked the emergence of different representational divisions to the planetary in

cartographic technology, in particular the curving of political geography into the

103 Lester B. Pearson, “Canada Looks ‘Down North’,” Foreign Affairs, July 1946, accessed at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/canada/1946-07-01/canada-looks-down-north. 104 Qikiqtani Inuit Association, “Iqaluit,” Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Community Histories 1950–1975 (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media: 2013), 10-14. 105 William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Transportation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 106 Ibid, 2. 107 Ibid, 3.

spherical,108 where continuity was essential and, perhaps most important in the sense that

I am drawing out here, “the Arctic in particular took on a new importance.”109

Interconnection, in the form of intercontinental aviation (especially the long range bomber110) and “mass production,” helped shift the largely “grid-based” Mercator mapping projects between 1915 and 1939 and, in so doing, projected an “immediate impression,” in the sense of shrinking interconnectedness, in the spherical earth sans orientation.111 Rankin singles out Wendell Wilkie in particular, whose “One World” map

ostensibly polarized world, looking down upon the spherical Earth and making Fairbanks

the centre of the planet. This drastically shrinks the Arctic Ocean—and therefore the

perceived distance between enemies—engendering the “air age” map that foregrounds

the North Pole that, once again, links the Americas to Asia and Europe through the land

bridge of the “straight lines.”112

The analogy extends quite far indeed. The United Nations emblem is drawn from

an air-age map, linking the relational move of the pole and world, the “tight spatial

interconnection” with a “new world order.”113 Rankin will make a different argument about the rise of postwar cartographic technologies culminating in a mathematical grid- based system (GPS, first initiated as a form of radiocartography). As the mathematical grid was a bid in part for the availability, no less the legibility, the “extensive survey” into “previously unbridgeable gaps”114 marks a surveying system whose “extensive

108 Ibid, 69. 109 Ibid, 70. 110 Ibid, 71. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid, 73. 113 Ibid, 77. 114 Ibid, 231.

survey work is just as much a part of the prehistory of GPS as is navigation.”115 Ergo, the

move from representational models of territorial map-making, largely the work of the

“international scientific collaboration,”116 to mathematical coordination, largely the work

the United States military, and which links the relation of “construction and monitoring

projects” in Frobisher Bay to the opening, the “countless auxiliary systems” in the hands

of states, corporations, and civilians, that “rely on its uninterrupted operation.”117 Rankin is ultimately arguing that geo-epistemology is the emergence of territory, less a matter of re-presentation as one of pre-sentation in “presence,” of inhabitation in world—a new spatiality of knowledge and power that multiplies and modulates territory beyond the representational borders of jurisdiction and national sovereignty. Rather than situate his theory of territorial change—shifts in and to the terms of sovereignty, jurisdiction, governance—merely in the decade of the 1970s, or as a story of networks corroding borders,118 he posits a process of an emergent infrastructure that, though always in some

sense relational to spatial control, is understood best as a vocabulary, method, and

technique119— a rhetoric—of the Second World War.

Thus, after the war these new defense projects opened by the polar, coupled with

the recognition of what the nuclear bombing of Japan implied for the future, and new

maps, new lines about the planetary, sparked significant worry in the federal government.

Given that Canada didn’t have the capacity to defend the opening of the northern border

in the event of a nuclear escalation, “Ottawa directed all efforts towards promoting

international co-operation and, as a first priority, control of atomic energy through the

115 Ibid. 116 Ibid, 295. 117 Ibid, 293. 118 Ibid, 11. 119 Ibid, 4.

United Nations.”120 The Arctic, opened now to the theatre of international development

and security, Canadian northern policy would variously take the form of defense

initiatives in support of its sovereignty over the Arctic, and, in turn, a domestic policy

that supported the growing population and the need for administration and social services.

Postwar Canada, meanwhile, was increasingly calling for the federal government to take

on more responsibility for social welfare.121 Jack Pickergsgill, then with the Department

of Mines and Resources, wrote a memo to Prime Minister Mackenzie King that northern

health care was becoming a “touchy subject.”122 In October 1945, the responsibility for

“medical care, hospitalization, and welfare programs for all Inuit and Indians was

transferred to the new ministry of National Health and Welfare.”123 But already by the

summer of 1945, Brooke Claxton, the first minister of National Health and Welfare,

made a priority of instituting and regularizing family allowances to Indigenous peoples in

the territories—though Inuit would receive, rather than cash, a payment in “specific

goods that would be of direct benefit to the children.”124 With the implementation of the family allowance program, “the identification of Eskimos—and the new attendant dilemma of defining who was an Eskimo—became an urgent matter.”125 And so: “The

stringent control required for the distribution of Family Allowances brought into being an

effective registration program. The Arctic was divided into twelve districts West (Wl, W2,

W3) and East (El to E9).” The old discs, which had been recalled, were replaced by small

circles of fibre, “free of design,” stamped “simply with a district designation and

120 Grant, Sovereignty, 159. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid, 161-162. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid, 163. 125 Roberts, “Eskimo,” 21. As Pamela Stern points out, the family allowance program also introduced significant “scrutiny and regulation of child rearing practices.” Pamela R. Stern, “Project Surname,” Historical Dictionary of the Inuit (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press Inc., 2004), 11.

number.”126

So rises another rhetoric of the opening: the Arctic signaculum pressed onto leather,

“ESKIMO IDENTICATION CANADA” marked on the face, a Crown at the core, composed of alphabetical and numerical identification—the stilled mark of the moving name that made trouble for the police and hospital registration forms. Much later, at a conference for KAIROS Canada at St. Paul University in 2015, Peter Irniq, the second commissioner of Nunavut, would say: “My story, my teachings, … I talk about moving from igloo to Internet in less than fifty years.” Part of that movement passed through this number: “E3-546,” the identification number given to Peter Irniq as a part of the “Eskimo disc identification system.” “E” for east, the region of the Arctic where he was born and lived, “3,” designating the region number, a geographic plot, and “546,” a numerical stand-in for the surname. Historically the Roman signaculum denoted a material representation of the mid-point between civilian and military citizen, a symbolic and identificatory intention for the future, and a position from the past: neither civilian nor fully citizen, a belonging and being in determination. The disc identification system, which begins with the alphabet and order, during the war, whose passage composes the logic of the identification system of the soldier, therefore names the signaculum before the identification. The disc names the being-in-determination toward what becomes known as “Project Surname.”127 While never legislated into existence, the project

emerged in the 1960s due to increasing intolerance by Inuit to continue being referenced

by a number system.128 While the proposition to do away with the disc system in favour

126 Ibid, 25. 127 For a thorough history of Project Surname and Inuit naming conventions in Nunavut, see Valerie Alia, Nunavut and Naming: Culture and Identity in the Inuit Homeland (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), especially 65-90. 128 Stern, “Project Surname,” Historical, 127.

of surnames had been suggested as early as 1961, with an official suggestion sent by the

Commissioner of the Northwest Territories to the federal Administrator of the Arctic in

1966,129 it was only in 1967 that there was real momentum. That year, the territorial

council underwent devolution from Ottawa to Yellowknife and appointed two Indigenous

councilors, including Abraham (Abe) Okpik, with Stuart Hodgson appointed as

Territorial Commissioner. Under Hodgson, what became known as Project Surname, “a

program directly connected to Vital Statistics,”130 was initiated in 1968, with Okpik,131

Inuvialuk132 from near Aklavik in the Mackenzie Delta region, officially overseeing it from 1969 to 1971.133 Okpik travelled to every community in the Northwest Territories, holding meetings and ultimately registering chosen surnames. “Adult men generally took their Inuit names as surnames” while married women had their name assigned according to the husband’s chosen name.134 As Stern and Roberts point out, a lack of standard

orthography 1971 meant that Sergeant’s Petty’s concerns in 1929 were realized.135

Surnames, as Alia points out and Laugrand and Oosten clarify, are not part of Inuit naming traditions,136 and since Project Surname Inuit have been variously engaged in reclaiming names.137 The purpose of this short history, however, has been to approach the signaculum, and therefore of the enablement of the time of the name. I return to this point in section 3 of this Introduction through Derrida’s surnom. In English, we could translate

129 Roberts, “Eskimo,” 25-27. 130 Qtd. in Alia, Naming, 68. 131 Okpik was the first Inuit Area Administrator at Taloyoak in the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut (formerly Spence Bay) and was an interpreter for the Department of Northern Affairs. 132 Stern, Historical, 121. 133 See Alia, Naming, 69-73. 134 Stern, Historical, 127. 135 Roberts, “Eskimo,” 31. 136 Ibid, 70. 137 This project is ongoing. As this dissertation has already implied, without speaking the name, Inuit have reclaimed a number of traditional place-names—Iqaluit (once “Frobisher Bay”), Qikiqtarjuaq (once “Broughton Island”), Kugaaruk (once “Pelly Bay”), and so on. As I write this dissertation, 2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages.

“surnom” to “on the name,” or “over the name,” “above the name,” “about the name,”

and no doubt other translations are possible. Translation is one of the core concerns of

Chapter 1, and by emerging the name we have, therefore, asked whether or not the time

of the Inuit surname is of finitude.

III. The Human

In keeping with a new belief in an expanded role for the state in improving the lives of all

Canadians, Ottawa increased its involvement in almost all aspects of Inuit life, including

housing, education, childcare, health care, and employment. Early in this period, one

high-ranking official wrote that his job was “to hasten the day when in every respect the

Eskimos can take their own places in the new kind of civilization which we—and they—

are building in their country.”138 To this end, no doubt, between 1953 and 1955, eighty-

six Inuit from Inukjuak, in Nunavik,139 were forced to relocate to newly established outposts in Grise Fjord on Ellesmere Island and Resolute on Cornwallis Island, in the extreme north where none in Inukjuak, or anyone anywhere else, had gone to sustain themselves. In a bid to vouchsafe Canadian Arctic sovereignty during the Cold War with

“human flagpoles,” families were forcefully relocated and in some cases separated, to where their knowledge of the landscape could no longer speak to them.140 Furthermore,

138 Letter from R.A. J. Phillips, Chief of the Arctic Division, Canada to Bishop (Anglican) Donald Marsh, 16 December 1957. Richard Diubaldo, The Government of Canada and the Inuit, 1900-1960 (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1985), 156. 139 This included now world-renowned author Markoosie, responsible for what is often considered one of the first examples of the Inuit novel form. See Markoosie, Harpoon of the Hunter (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1970). 140 This was the conclusion drawn by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1994, which had amassed overwhelming evidence against federal government claims that the relocations were voluntary. However, the Commission pulled back from condemning the relocations as a deliberate act of sovereignty-claiming, suggesting that there was, on the one hand, no single voice from which the government spoke, and, on the other, indications of concern for the welfare of the Inuit (132-133). See “The High Arctic Relocation: A Report on the 1953-1955 Relocation,” Ottawa, Minister of Supply and Services Canada (1994). In 1996, the Government of Canada agreed to pay 10 million dollars in compensation to the families (Stern, Historical, 60). In 2010, the Canadian government under then Prime

with the collapse of the fur trade in the 1940s and 1950s, this “hastening” took the form

of an interventionism that results in arguably the most significant event in Nunangat

contemporary history: the implementation of permanent settlements and the introduction

of the wage economy.141 The life of Inuit in the Nunangat as told by the old

anthropologists and ethnographers and explorers ends with this settlement.

In 1958, three significant events underlined the increasing development and

permanent settlement of Inuit peoples: 1) John Diefenbaker famously proposed his

“Roads to Resources” campaign, which promised the uncovering and pursuit of oil and

mineral resources yet untapped in the Arctic; 2) the passage of the nuclear submarine

USS Nautilus to the geographic North Pole in response to the nuclear threat posed by

Russian ICBMs, becoming the first ship to reach it; and 3), the first UN Conference on

the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS I) in Geneva, which would become only the second

successful attempt in the 20th century at codifying international maritime law.142 The

UNCLOS I conference codified five main categories of international waters:

“international waters, territorial seas, contiguous zones, the continental shelf and the high

seas.”143 Two years later, UNCLOS II would help define the 12 nautical mile zone of territorial waters, wherein the state retained “complete sovereignty.”144 UNCLOS I

“confirmed the American claim to jurisdiction and control of its natural resources up to a

depth of 200 metres and 200 nautical miles beyond the coast, with limits extended in a

Minister Stephen Harper officially apologized, through then Indian and Northern Affairs Minister John Duncan, to Inuit for the forced relocations—admitting only to a “failed promise.” See “Apology for the Inuit High Arctic Relocation,” accessed at: https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100016115/1534786491628. 141 See especially Peter Kulchyski and Frank Tester, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-63 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994), 5-8. 142 For a comprehensive study, see Michael Byers, International Law and the Arctic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 92-113. 143 Grant, Polar, 342. 144 Ibid.

later revision.”145 By the 1960s, hydrocarbon potential all throughout what would become known as Nunavut, and parts of the Northwest Territories, was identified, with over 40 million acres of exploration permits granted to oil and resources companies from Canada and the United States. By the time of Pearson’s tenure as Prime Minister between 1963 and 1968, there were exploratory drills in Resolute Bay, Melleville Island, and Bathurst

Island.

The “emergence” or “rise” of what is often called Inuit political consciousness or political awareness,146 or collective historical consciousness,147 might be drawn to March of 1968 when Marvin Magnus, who might only have been an artist but for some troubling economic conditions in the 1930s,148 turned his attention to geology, and, as a part of a

team composed of employees of Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), now a British

Petroleum subsidiary, and Humble Oil, now owned by Exxon, staked what was to be

known as the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field in the Alaskan North Slope. Magnus’ discovery

further wet the lips of the Canadian government and its industry partners for oil and gas

exploration in the Arctic. The Prudhoe Bay oil field, with a persuasive 25 billion barrels

of oil, promised to become the most significant oil field in North America and attracted

the attention Standard Oil of Ohio and Humble Oil (later Exxon-Mobile). The discovery

of oil on Alaska’s North Slope “unleashed a combination of forces that forever changed

145 Ibid, 343. 146 What Sarah Bonesteel called the “rise of Inuit political awareness” (xi) and what Natalia Loukacheva called “emerging Inuit political awareness.” See Sarah Bonesteel, Canada’s Relationship With Inuit: A History of Policy and Program Development, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (Ottawa, 2008), xiii; Natalia Loukacheva, The Arctic Promise: Legal and Political Autonomy in Greenland and Nunavut (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 27. 147 Frédéric Laugrand, “Écrire Pour Prendre la Parole: Conscience Historique, Mémoires d’Aînés et Régimes d’Historicité au Nunavut,” Anthropologie et Sociétés 26, no. 2-3 (2002), 91–116. 148 Magnus of course was a significant artist in Alaskan history. See “Alaska Artists: Marvin Magnus,” Alaskan Nature, accessed at: http://www.alaskannature.com/Marvin_Mangus.htm.

the course of Arctic history.”149 As Grant puts it, the dam of competing interests finally broke: “the oil and gas industry, various environmental groups, commercial shipping and government vessels, as well as aboriginal land claims and demands for the right self- government” all emerged from this discovery—though this will have taken many different forms throughout 1968 to 1970. “Fearing “irreparable harm to their environment,” Inuit “responded with a call for a unified voice to counter adverse political decisions of their southern-based nation-states.”150

With Pierre Eliot Trudeau elected Prime Minister of Canada, and encouraged by the hydrocarbon potential waiting in the Arctic, he ordered the creation of the Task Force on

Northern Oil Development to collect all available data on oil (and its transportation) potential in the region—which would become the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline proposal, famously struck down in cooperation with Inuit and Northern Indigenous communities.151

Another significant catalyst occurs a year later with the release of the Pierre Eliot

Trudeau government’s 1969 “White Paper.”152 In the first volume of the Royal

149 Grant, Polar, 339. As the history of the Nunangat proceeds toward the present, resource development projects, seismic surveys, and seabed mapping remains an ongoing and significant point of contention between Inuit and the settler state in the media and the courts. I address part of this in Chapter 1. For an overview of Arctic resource development from a legal perspective, see Dwight G. Newman, Michelle Biddulph, and Lorelle Binnion, “Arctic Energy Development and Best Practices On Consultation With Indigenous Peoples,” Boston University International Law Journal 32, no. 2 (2014), 101-160. The first sentence of Newman et al.’s article states that Arctic energy development has “enormous potential to meet the world energy needs” (101). This is perhaps not altogether surprising because their concerns rest with the judicial “norms of consultation,” what are imagined as the practical, reasonable, and responsible actualization of energy development potential given the reality of Arctic Indigenous peoples. But the other side of this claim is the form of the Arctic, dually conceived: first, plotted globally, as a canary or savior to nation- state economic futures; second, as a space-for-development. In both instances, the Arctic is more simply rendered as the form “future.” 150 Grant, Polar, 339, emphasis mine. 151 See Justice Thomas R. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, Volume 1, Minister of Supply and Services Canada (1977). 152 This document was intended to put an end to the “special” relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Government of Canada in the Indian Act. To this end, the White Paper opens: “To be an Indian is to be a man, with all of man’s needs and abilities.” This would turn out to be a fateful claim. “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (The White Paper, 1969), accessed at: https://www.aadnc- aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100010189/1100100010191. This moment of Indigenous activism in Canada is part of a larger context of Indigenous activism, as in the United States with the American Indian Movement (AIM). See for example Randall A. Lake, “Enacting Red Power: The Consummatory Function in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 2 (1983), 127-142.

Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the White Paper was considered the third of four

“stages” of the relationship between the Government of Canada and Indigenous peoples.

The first stage was the pre-contact period of the 16th century, ending with the closure of

the oceanic barrier, beginning with Henry VII’s 1496 issuance of letters patent to John

Cabot and his sons, granting “full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts,

regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea, under our banners, flags and

ensigns,” and the landing at present-day Newfoundland, closing, or rather enclosing the

barrier forever more around the year 1500; the second stage, of more extensive co-

operation between colonists and Indigenous peoples, including the establishment of trade

and military alliances, fortresses, routes, and cultural adaptation, comes to an end around

the signing of Canadian confederation in 1867 and the opening of the west in British

Columbia in 1870; the third stage, of displacement and assimilation in the form of

relocations, residential schools, and the entrenchment of racist nation-state law and policy,

comes to an “end” with the release of the White Paper.153 The Royal Commission marks the end of the third period with this document, and the emergence of the fourth stage of negotiation and renewal, because it is widely regarded to have “created” a “storm of protest.”154

In the rush for Arctic oil in both Canada and the US, drilling and seismic survey licenses were granted for what was presumed to be Crown land without any consultation with Inuit peoples. The effects of these projects continue to be heard in consultation rooms, a central concern of Chapter 1. It was this increasing economic and political encroachment into the land that, in part, led to the formation of the Committee of

153 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, “Volume 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back,” 42-44. 154 Ibid, 186.

Original People’s Entitlement (COPE) in 1970 in the Mackenzie Delta region,155 described as the first Inuvialuit political organization, and responsible for the signing of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement in 1984, the first comprehensive land claim signed north of the 60th parallel.156 In 1971, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), changing its name to

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) in 2001, was founded in Ottawa as the Canadian representative organization for Inuit in Canada. In 1976 and 1982, ITC was responsible for the first bids at a land claims settlement for the Northwest Territories. In 1979, ITC oversaw the Inuit Committee on National Issues (ICNI) “which was organized … to represent Inuit views on Canada’s Constitution.” The ICNI “was part of the Aboriginal

Rights Coalition that successfully lobbied the federal and provincial governments to reinstate Section 35 of the Constitution.”157 ITC also organized and implemented the

Land Use and Occupancy Map project in 1976, after a 1973 use and occupancy study.158

This was instrumental toward the negotiation and final signing of the Nunavut Land

Claims Agreement in 1993 and the creation of the new Canadian territory of Nunavut on

April 1, 1999.159 In 1973, Robert Peterson of Peqatiqiit Kalaallit (Association of

155 What will become known as the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR) or Inuvialuit Nunangit Sannaiqtuaq (INS) in the Northwest Territories. 156 Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, “The Western Arctic Claim: a Guide to the Inuvialuit Final Agreement” (Ottawa: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1984). See also Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, “Inuvialuit Final Agreement,” accessed at: https://www.irc.inuvialuit.com/inuvialuit-final-agreement. 157 Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, “Who We Are,” accessed at: https://www.itk.ca/national-voice-for-communities-in-the- canadian-arctic/. 158 The Calder v. British Columbia Supreme Court of Canada decision in 1973 affirmed the evidentiary value of gathering data in support of “use and occupancy,” the language used by the Court to found Aboriginal title existing prior to European contact. See also Hugh Brody’s essential text wherein he re-wrote a use and occupancy study report for the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs at the Northern Pipeline Agency, paired with memoire “and anecdote.” Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1992). For a treatment of the “problem of speaking for,” and all that attends to the question of representation in this thematic and rhetorical arena, see Sophie McCall, First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 43-75. 159 For a significant history of Nunavut charting the relationship between Inuit and regional identity, see John Bennett and Susan Rowley (eds.), Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). For an empirical and field-study of the history of Nunavut, see Ailsa Henderson, Nunavut: Rethinking Political Culture Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007). According to Légaré, identity was increasingly regionalized, “(re)defined on a civic regional scale” and “less and less solely in cultural terms.” That is to say, the privileging of the terms “Nunavummiut”

36 Greenlanders in Denmark) organized the Arctic Peoples Conference at the University of

Copenhagen, marking the first such meeting that had ever been held, to discuss “shared concerns” and “common goals”: control over hydrocarbon development, colonialism, subsistence and Indigenous rights chief among them. Present at the meeting were members of ITC and COPE. The meeting passed two significant resolutions: the first called for governments to recognize “the citizenship rights” of Indigenous peoples “in their nations”; the second called for the “creation of an ongoing Circumpolar Body of

Indigenous Peoples.” From this meeting and resolution emerged the Inuit Circumpolar

Conference (eventually the Inuit Circumpolar Council, ICC) in 1977, first held in Barrow,

Alaska, and organized by Eben Hopson.160 The ICC would rise to become a decentralized,

“highly democratic,”161 and nongovernmental supranational entity representing Inuit peoples at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues, and as a permanent participant at the Arctic Council.162 The ICC is also responsible for choosing and recognizing the common term “Inuit” as a circumpolar descriptor of shared peoplehood.163 As Jessica Shadian has argued, the ICC has significantly advanced Inuit

over “Inuit,” “based on Inuit socio-cultural traits and activities.” Légaré continues, “Nunavummiut identity portrayed by various socio-cultural symbols will inherit strong Inuit cultural foundations.” See André Légaré, “Inuit Identity and Regionalization in the Canadian Central and Eastern Arctic: A Survey of Writings About Nunavut,” Polar Geography 31, no. 3-4 (2008), 99-118. See also Janet Mancini Billson, “Social Change, Social Problems, and the Search for Identity: Canada’s Northern Native Peoples in Transition,” The American Review of Canadian Studies 28 no. 3 (1988), 295–315; Susane Dybbroe, “Question of Identity and Issues of Self-Determination,” Etudes/Inuit/Studies 20, no. 2 (1996), 39–53. 160 Hopson, Iñupiat, was then the mayor of the Alaska North Slope Burough (NSP). In 1971 the US Congress adopted the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which provided almost a billion dollars and created twelve for-profit organizations with mineral and surface rights for 180,000 square kilometers of land, thereby providing “greater certainty for the oil industry as well as a degree of self-government for the indigenous peoples” (Byers, Law, 220). With increasing militarization of the Arctic and the 1968 Prudhoe oil discovery, the NSP formed in 1972 as “an example of a state-chartered municipal government intended by its founders to allow Iñupiat control over land-use planning, education, social services, economic development, and public safety…. The Iñupiaq founders of the North Slope Borough viewed the borough as a mechanism to protect the Inuit subsistence economy through land-use regulation and by levying taxes on the Prudhoe Bay oil installations” (Stern, Historical, 13-14). Broadly speaking, the NSP can be understood within the same political “awakening” as the ITC, COPE, and the ICC. 161 Byers, Law, 226. 162 Ibid, 227. 163 See especially Mary Simon, Inuit: One Future, One Arctic (Peterborough, Ontario: The Cider Press, 1996).

37 concerns on the global stage, positioning them as what she calls a new polity.164 I will

return to the ICC, turning first to the Arctic Council, where the name “Inuit” speaks to the

world.

The establishment of the UN Environmental Program in 1972, persuaded by the

increasing cooperation through detente in the 1970s between the eastern and western

blocs, signaled early international cooperation around perceived environmental threats to

the Arctic ecosystem.165 Maxwell Cohen of McGill University had suggested, by 1971,

“the time had come to establish a framework for international cooperation among the nations of the Arctic region.”166 The goal was the same as what linked international

communities together around the Arctic after the de-escalation of security concerns:

environmental, scientific, and economic development.167 While the idea was well-

received in Ottawa, it didn’t go anywhere until, in 1987, a working group established a

position paper on Canadian Arctic diplomacy, which provisionally called for the creation

of an Arctic Council “to coordinate international activities in the area.”168 In 1989, then

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney delivered a speech in the USSR calling for multilateral

environmental and scientific cooperation in the Arctic,169 already channeling his

enthusiasm about the proposal. Another working group formed in 1990 and produced the

164 See Jessica M. Shadian, The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty: Oil, Ice, and Inuit Governance (New York: Routledge, 2014). She argues that this narrative depends on the ICC’s ability to adapt to changing global circumstances, with climate change as the benchmark. 165 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the first partnership was the 1973 “Polar Bear Act” between Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States, formally known as the International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, concerning population and ecosystem management. To my mind, the authoritative text on this and related subjects is George Wenzel, Sometimes Hunting Can Seem Like Business: Polar Bear Sport Hunting in Nunavut (Calgary: Canadian Circumpolar Institute Press, 2008). See also 1973 International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, accessed at: http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/agreements/agreement1973.html. 166 Douglas C. Nord, The Changing Arctic: Creating a Framework for Consensus Building and Governance Within the Arctic Council (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 32. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid, 31.

more extensive To Establish an Arctic Basin Council report.170 Joe Clark, then with the

Department of External Affairs, announced upon review, “Canada intends to propose an

Arctic Council to the seven other Arctic countries.”171 In 1991, the “Arctic Council Panel”

produced a Framework Report, proposing “an inclusive membership for the Arctic

Council in which there would be direct representation of northern aboriginal peoples and

nongovernmental organizations as well as the traditional nation-states of the region.”172

The Arctic Council Panel wrote a follow-up later that same year, stressing the need for

“matters of economic, political, social, military, and environmental affairs,”173 again

enthusiastically supported by the Canadian government.

The eight Arctic nations174 were, at the time, attempting to sign an Arctic

Environmental Protection Strategy in an attempt to monitor air and water quality across the region, first proposed in 1989.175 As Nord makes clear, even if participation among

non-state actors was assumed and put forward, this “Canadian proposal” was in a bid to

“enable [Canada] to distinguish themselves within the changing international

community.”176 The Arctic Council proposal was not met with universal regard by the

other seven nations, however, and especially not by the United States. The George H.W.

Bush administration had significant disagreements with the “goals and structure” of the

organization, worried that the Arctic Council would interfere with their expanding

military and security focused approach to the region. Opening the Arctic to multilateral

170 Franklyn Griffiths and Rosemarie Kuptana, “To Establish an Arctic Basin Council,” Canadian Arctic Resources Committee (June 1990), accessed at: http://arctic.gordonfoundation.ca/sites/default/files/March_1990_- _To_Establish_an_Arctic_Basin_Council_VERSION_1.pdf. 171 Qtd. in Nord, Changing, ibid. 172 Ibid, 33. 173 Ibid. 174 Canada; Denmark; Finland; Iceland; Norway; Russia; Sweden; and the United States. 175 Ibid, 30. 176 Ibid, 35.

39 decision-making, and giving power to non-state actors was not acceptable to

Washington.177 By 1994, the Clinton administration was only reaffirming what the Bush administration had stressed. The Arctic Council had to retrain the form of a “primarily inter-governmental association.”178 In 1995, Canada asked the United States to formally commit itself to the Arctic Council, which it agreed to “in an effort to eliminate what they saw as a nagging irritant in the bilateral relationship.”179 But a year after the agreement in

principle, the United States still could not agree to the form and content of the Canadian

proposal. In 1996, the US drafted its own proposal—diluting the scope and authority of

the Arctic Council by rendering it an inter-state “problem-solving forum” where US

interests (military and strategic) could veto the intended “open,” “sustainable” and

sweeping intention of the 1990 and 1991 proposals.180 The 1996 Ottawa Declaration181

would accept all these changes, influencing the form that participation in, and adjacent to,

takes in Arctic Council to this day.182

The opening paragraph of Michael Byers’ book on the Arctic and international law

evokes the conjunction that, on the one hand, places the Arctic into the world of

international law, and, on the other hand, particularizes the Arctic in its distinctness. Such

is the consequence of an Arctic largely shaped by the contours of international law and its

scholarship.183 Byers describes this “remarkable place” along a sunlit midnight stroll, the

“same sunlight” shining upon him as in India. There is a perfectly good reason to make

177 Ibid, 36. 178 Ibid, 38. 179 Ibid, 39. 180 Ibid, 40-41. 181 Ottawa Declaration (1996), accessed at: https://oaarchive.arctic-council.org/handle/11374/85. Though the Declaration affirms “commitment to the well-being of the inhabitants of the Arctic, including recognition of the special relationship and unique contributions to the Arctic of indigenous people and their communities,” many Indigenous scholars have criticized, rightly I think, the liberal recognition model of rights that founds claims like these. 182 Ibid, 42. 183 This isn’t a complete indictment of Byers, however, for his work is indeed extremely careful, thorough, and often thoughtful.

this connection. After all, he aims to think through the Arctic in precisely this way, what

Carl Schmitt named nomos of the Earth.184 But Schmitt’s nomos—the original act— evinces a troubled metaphor here. While the Earth is rendered the “mother of law,” its borders are roots, soil, agriculture, pasture.185 But Byers’ soil is frozen gravel and sand,

old and desolate. Its borders are adopted. “No country will ever ‘own’ the North Pole,” he

writes, because, under the conditions and terms that he’s writing, even though the shores

and seabed near states are may be claimed, “the surface, water column, and at least some

of the seabed of the central Arctic Ocean belong to all humanity.”186 But “more recently,”

he says, the Arctic has been reshaped by climate change.187 Already in 2004, in the wake

of the 2001 International Panel on Climate Change report, a study ordered by The Arctic

Council188 called the Arctic a place of “special importance to the world” that is “changing

rapidly.”189 While the report made efforts to describe some of the negative impacts of

what were then the projected effects of climate change, only more severe every year, the

report makes clear that “Whether a particular impact is perceived as negative or positive

often depends on one’s interests,”190 even though this also meant the projection of a disastrous and potentially fatal outcomes to ice, animals, “hunting culture,” and food security for Inuit and Arctic Indigenous peoples.191 Such is the turn toward the Arctic: the

184 “As long as the Greek word nomos in the often cited passages of Heraclitus and Pindar is transformed from a spatially concrete, constitutive act of order and orientation … all disputes about interpretation are hopeless and all philological acumen is fruitless …. In reality, the words of Heraclitus and Pindar mean only that all subsequent regulations of a written or unwritten kind derive their power from the inner measure of an original, constitutive I act of spatial ordering. This original act is nomos.” Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, translated by G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003), 76, emphasis mine. 185 So returns the nurse of the roots of the ancient Arctic tree. 186 Byers, Law, 1, emphasis mine. 187 Ibid, 2. 188 The Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), accessed at: https://www.amap.no/documents/download/1058/inline. 189 Ibid, i. 190 Ibid, 8. 191 Ibid, 16.

“intense experience” of “negatively” affecting “traditional lifestyles” punctuated by its

“expanding opportunities,”192 the end and opening.

“The Inuit have,” as Byers puts it, “made progress in alerting the rest of humanity to the scale and immediacy of climate change.”193 An example of this, as I indicated

above, is Sheila Watt-Cloutier. In 2005, when she was the chair of the ICC, she and 62

other Inuit from Canada and the US submitted a petition to the Inter-American

Commission on Human Rights drawing on the 2001 IPCC report and the 2004 Arctic

Climate Impact Assessment, to argue that “impacts of climate change, caused by acts and

omissions by the United States, violate the Inuit’s fundamental human rights protected by

the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and other international

instruments.”194 The petition argued that Inuit, defined as “the people,”195 fundamental rights to their territory, the practice of traditional cultural activities, to health and life, residence and movement, and subsistence were all violated by the present and future impacts of US emissions on the Arctic environment and its peoples.196 ”Because climate

change is threatening the lives, health, culture and livelihoods of the Inuit,” the petition

concluded, “it is the responsibility of the United States, as the largest source of

greenhouse gases, to take immediate and effective action to protect the rights of the

Inuit.”197 A year later, the Commission responded that the information presented constituted “alleged facts” that weren’t enough to enable the probing into the violation of

192 Ibid, 8-9. I return to this in detail in Chapter 1. 193 Byers, Law, 227. The ICC has, among other things, played a role in the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and has long been an advocate in international forums for environmental stewardship. 194 Inuit Circumpolar Conference, “Petition to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights Seeking Relief from Violations Resulting from Global Warming Caused By Acts and Omissions of the United States,” submitted by Sheila- Watt Cloutier, December 7, 2005, 5, accessed at: https://www.inuitcircumpolar.com/press-releases/inuit-petition-inter- american-commission-on-human-rights-to-oppose-climate-change-caused-by-the-united-states-of-america/. 195 Ibid, 1. 196 Ibid, 6; 90. 197 Ibid, 7.

rights.198 This rejection, however, still provoked an international conversation linking climate change to human rights and, from then on, persistently linked “Inuit” to environmental stewardship against climate change.

Despite the adoption of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of

Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP),199 the ICC’s participation is still extremely limited at the

Arctic Council as concerns decision-making power “at the table.” Thus, when in 2008 the

six permanent participants,200 along with Iceland, Sweden, and Finland, weren’t invited

to a meeting of the “Arctic Five” in Ilulissat, Greenland, the ICC issued its “Circumpolar

Declaration on Sovereignty in the Arctic.” The Declaration ostensibly answered to the

exclusion, but also included the following: “Central to our rights as a people is the right

to self-determination. It is our right to freely determine our political status, freely pursue

our economic, social, cultural and linguistic development, and freely dispose of our

natural wealth and resources. States are obligated to respect and promote the realization

of our right to self-determination.”201 It continues:

“Sovereignty” is a term that has often been used to refer to the absolute and independent authority of a community or nation both internally and externally. Sovereignty is a contested concept, however, and does not have a fixed meaning. Old ideas of sovereignty are breaking down as different governance models, such as the European Union, evolve. Sovereignties overlap and are frequently divided within federations in creative ways to recognize the right of peoples … issues of sovereignty and sovereign rights must be examined and assessed in the context of

198 Jane George, “ICC Climate Change Petition Rejected,” Nunatsiaq December 15, 2006, accessed at: https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/icc_climate_change_petition_rejected/. 199 UN General Assembly, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: resolution / adopted by the General Assembly, 2 October 2007, accessed at: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration- on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html. 200 They are: The Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabaskan Council, the Gwich’in Council International, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples in the North, and the Saami Council. 201 “A Circumpolar Inuit Declaration on Sovereignty in the Arctic,” April 2009, sec. 1.4, accessed at: https://www.itk.ca/circumpolar-declaration-arctic-soveriegnty/.

43 our long history of struggle to gain recognition and respect as an Arctic indigenous people having the right to exercise self-determination over our lives, territories, cultures and languages.202 I take up the question of sovereign untranslatability in Chapter 1, where its constitutive enablement appears in the form of movement. I have suggested that the derivation of

Arctic rhetoric in relation to sovereignty as a matter of rhetoric rather than of international law. The term “Inuit,” as we have seen, emerged as a deliberate political elaboration coincident with the rise of national and international representative organizations like the ICC in the context of the threat of the exponential growth of natural resource development across the circumpolar north, coincident with the rise of the end, the opening, and the name. With all three terms, Inuit have been encountered, counted, and enclosed. Traditionally, no single term existed to refer to every community that would compose the homeland of the Inuit Nunaat—and indeed, many elders have expressed uncertainty and resignation to the idea of a single expression. Traditionally in the Nunangat, the ethnic suffix –miut (people of) would be used, as with the ethnonym

Netsilingmiut, the people of the Netsilik region. “Inuit,” therefore, in making reference to a peoplehood, a unified people, emerges with a particular historical context. However,

“Inuit” is, like autonomy,203 a non-static name both in reference and translation, and demands a complex translation and invention that is, in part, undertaken in Chapter 1.

This dissertation is in approach of a “sovereignty” that issues alongside self- determination, recognized by international law, and the sovereignty that “self- determination” is in contestation with,204 as human or inherent rights.205 As Rosemarie

202 Ibid, sec. 2.1, emphasis mine. 203 Loukacheva, Promise, 3-10. 204 To this end there is a significant and implied, but unaddressed, literature of land transfers, maritime treaties, boundary disputes, geomorphological research, geopolitics, and legal maneuvering that can’t hope to be taken up in this

44 Kuptana, former president of ITK, once said: “We are a people who have been subjected

to the sovereignty of Canada without our consent, without recognition of our collective

identity as a people and in violation of our right to self-determination under international

law.”206 That is to say, self-determination is constituted under a rights-based framework

that issues challenges to nation-state sovereignty and the colonial administration of

peoples within the jurisdictions and borders of the state. Self-determination is included in

the Charter of the United Nations as one of its core principles toward the creation of well-

being, understood as a form of stability and relation between and among nations.207 Prior

to the First World War, self-determination simply meant the condition of the sovereign

nation to act independently of other sovereign nations, “vesting” it “in the entire

population of an existing State,” rendering it a “latent synonym” of sovereignty and its

colonial territories authorized by international law.208 Only after the First World War did

the concept attain its own sovereignty, in a matter of speaking, from the nomos of

international nation-state sovereignty. Rather than the capacity to autonomously pursue

nation-state sovereignty given the recognition of that sovereignty, co-extensive with its

people, the Paris peace process saw the consolidation of a terminology toward the

legitimatization of state-creation from the aftermath of the war, in regard to the

populations of those states, as self-determining.209 Rather than constituted power, the terminology of self-determination shifted, at least in the case of Europe and those nations

dissertation. Future research should approach these nation-state forms as matters of rhetoric. For a significant history and reading of sector theory, historic waters, straight baselines, and the law of international boundaries, see Donat Pharand, Canada’s Arctic Waters in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 205 Inherent rights are prior to, and in excess of, Crown or state sovereignty. This discourse has largely emerged in response to the liberal nation-state recognition of Indigenous rights. See James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence and Aboriginal Rights: Defining the Just Society (Saskatoon: Native Law Centre, University of Saskatchewan, 2006). 206 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, “Volume 2: Restructuring the Relationship,” 109. 207 See U.N. Charter, art. 1(2), 1 U.N.T.S. XVI (Oct. 24, 1945). 208 Patrick Macklem, The Sovereignty of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 165-166. 209 Ibid, 167.

recognized as “sufficiently developed,” to constituent power, “of a people to form a

political community.”210 The 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations therefore issued its

“mandates,” which accorded the language of states to determine the extent of its

“tutelage,” advising, and administration of state constituent populations in accordance to the language of sufficient development and state sophistication—toward the “sacred trust of civilization.”211 This colonial conception of self-determination obtained until after the

Second World War, until the enactment of the 1948 Charter of the United Nations

affirmed its core principle. In 1960, the UN General Assembly enacted the Declaration

on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Territories, “recognizing that the peoples of

the world ardently desire the end of colonialism in all its manifestations,” marks self-

determination as an “inalienable right to complete freedom” to “freely determine their

political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development,” and

that populations must be enabled to enjoy “complete independence.”212 At the same time,

however, the Declaration reaffirmed the integrity of the nation-state.213

As is clear in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, however, the relation between

international and state law as it concerns the question of Inuit sovereignty is not

disappeared. What’s clear here is that context is important. There is no general way in

which Inuit or the even the nation-state is using the word “sovereignty.” But the point of

this story has been to emerge “the human,” the one that is ecologically given in the way

that contemporary rhetoricity calls. In this sense, the gesture is to “Inuit” as “human

being,” or “the people,” understood as it has been in the global exchange where Inuit

210 Ibid. 211 Wilson Report to the Third Plenary Session of the Peace Conference, Foreign Office, Quai D’Orsay, PPW 55:176 (Feb. 14, 1919), qtd. in Macklem, 167. 212 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, art. 1, G.A. Res. 1514, U.N. GAOR 15th Sess., Supp. No. 15, U.N. Doc. A/4654 (1960). 213 Macklem, Sovereignty, 170.

have emerged as caretakers of the earth.

So the story unfolds as the history of the contemporary Arctic proceeding from the end and the opening toward the name of the “human face,” those of human rights frameworks and petitions, where the claims of Inuit sovereignty are matters of public concern, as with the climate change appeals to shared human planetary being—which advance Inuit goals within different nation-states, but at the cost of obscuring what lies behind the right (the land, not the planet; the Nunaat, not ἀρκτικός). Byers notes that in this sense ICC Declaration of Sovereignty is not so much a declaration of sovereignty so much as it is a declaration on sovereignty.214 Yet I think he has the poles reversed on this one. It is precisely that it is a declaration of sovereignty, in the sense that this preposition names the definitional terms of the sovereign who can claim, and therefore recognize or

“enable.” It is in this way that it is a declaration of sovereignty as a composition, in the way Glen Coulthard might have argued.215

3. Rhetoric

In this way, “Arctic rhetoric” tends toward the contours of Arctic diplomacy, geopolitics,

panels, internal gatherings, press releases, reports, speeches, and declarations. In this way,

Inuit Nunangat is the imitation of the ocean that belongs to humanity, for the moral spirit

214 Byers, Law, 231. 215 Coulthard’s project, of course, was ultimately one of “coexistence,” grounded in an ideal. The recognition-based approach of the (neo) liberal nation-state in its dealings with Indigenous peoples, far from securing self-determination, has merely consolidated “the subjective and structural composition of settler-colonial power” (24). To interpolate is to be interpolated in return, and thus there is coexistence without homeland, and there is no homeland without the grounding “of ourselves” (179). Whether this means the decolonizing power of affect, like anger and resentment (128)—which gestures also in some sense to Audra Simpson’s notion of “refusal,” a form of nested sovereignty whose logic, in turn, often refused her own attempt to write—or a sustained critique of what enables the grounds of identity through which a claim engages in the risk of reciprocation and its translations (76-77). Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). See also Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

of participation and negotiation that has obtained in the Arctic since the end of the Cold

War, for worldly grounds of climate change policy appeals as they occur at the order of

the Arctic Council. It also means that Inuit sovereignty can be usefully framed by the

rhetorics at issue in this dissertation. If we are all implicated by the effects of what

happens in the Arctic, whether as a form of habitability or hospitality, as a question of

finitude, or as a material disclosure, then the “on” of Inuit sovereignty claims cohabitates

with the “immanent social function” of the common.216 In what meaningful sense is

climate change not merely the exception to which the question of sovereignty is itself

suspended by world, the common, or finitude—that is to say, by rhetoric? Is it that we

still belong to this ever-changing yet imperturbable genealogy?217

Recall that I evoked the ecological chōra, and in doing so suggested an affinity between the rhetorical response and an Inuit “face” of relation on Earth, between us.

Derrida, for his part, has also evoked the chōra, he called it the khōra, so that he could describe an enablement of what grants “taking place,”218 “the irreplaceable place or placement … a spacing from ‘before’ the world, the cosmos, or the globe, from ‘before’ any chronophenomenology, any revelation, any ‘as such’ and any ‘as if’.”219 The word

“spacing” here is quite key, for Derrida is playing in at least two ways with it. In the first

instance, we might say the “spacing” is the “placing” of the before, what allows for the

sequence to emerge in space and time. Mirroring this is his theory of espacement, the

216 I treat John Muckelbauer’s concept of the common in more detail in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. See Muckelbauer, Future, 160. 217 As Derrida put it, of, perhaps from, Plato to Bodin, Hobbes, Grotius, Pascal, Rousseau, and Schmitt. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xi. 218 Derrida, Rogues, xiv. 219 Ibid.

logic of the trace, the non-sequential inhabitation of time in space and space in time.220

For Derrida in this moment, khōra is “before” world, creation, the gift, of being—before, in the sense of Derridean iterability, the non-coincidence and non-presence of repetition.

Derrida will say there is no law, politics, or ethics that can be “deduced” from this place, this taking-place of the khōra, and this is precisely the point. The deduction, the withdrawal, the presence, or the stilling would be the act of the sovereign, from which would issue all the terms previously mentioned. Yet, the non-deducibility from the

“before” always leaves its “trace” in the “to come,” à venir, l’avenir, the future that does not come after the present and past.221 This call is unconditional in the way hospitality is unconditional, in the way of the opening, the leaving open of the future, which comes but not tomorrow, an announcement without the call.222 I draw out Derrida’s reading of the

khōra alongside the rhetorical ecology of chōra so to illustrate the non-sovereign affinity

between the two: in the land, intensivity; in-tensivity of (taking) place is the future, the

coming of, unconditionally without.

And Derrida is clear on this point: “Khōra reaches us, and as the name.”223 When a name comes, he continues, it says more than a name, for it announces an irruption, like the khōra that says “this and that.”224 It proceeds, it comes as if, as in a dream, oscillating

not between poles, for khōra is not polar, but rather is the oscillating oscillator, the

modulation of oscillation.225 That is to say, the khōra is what gives the polar but what

220 Martin Hägglund calls it the becoming-space of time and becoming-time of space. This is taken up in the dissertation’s Conclusion. 221 While these are significant concerns in the whole dissertation, this question is especially taken up in Chapter 1. 222 Ibid, 144. 223 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavy, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89. 224 Ibid. 225 Ibid, 90.

does not submit to it, for it is the call of the name, it is what moves the call.226 The khōra

then names the surnom, the “surname,” the more-than-the-name that is the being of and

yet not in, what receives without taking—the enablement, the future, of finitude. The

surnom of khōra “is not, is not above all,” is not “but a support or a subject which would

give place by receiving or by conceiving, or indeed by letting itself be conceived.”227

There is “khōra” but the khōra, being named, does not exist as such, for it is the

effacement of what receives the giving of the name, and cannot receive for its own

sake.228 In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, I have called this “rhythm,” and in Chapter 3,

“modulation.” As the receptacle, of place, of worlding, of emplacement, of espacement, khōra “gives place to all the stories, ontologic or mythic, that can be recounted on the subject of what” receives, “and even of that which resembles but in fact takes place in” that which “does not become the object of any tale, whether true or fabled. A secret without secret remains, forever impenetrable” à son sujet.229 Thus, for Derrida, the

surname, the khōra, plays an analogous role in philosophy, an analogy for what it names

only in what receives the name.230 The analogy is the passage of the granting that speaks

only of the enablement. Derrida has described this process toward the giving of the

unconditional, what gives and, by giving, what effaces the sovereign by revealing what

we all share-in-relation.

The end, the opening, the name, and the human being are, I submit, rhetorical, or rather, rhetoric in advance. The rhetorical scholars and theories I will be in approach to throughout the dissertation are all in some way implicated in this movement just

226 Ibid, 92. 227 Ibid, 95. 228 Ibid, 97-98. 229 Ibid, 117, emphasis mine. 230 Ibid, 126.

described, and it is for this reason that the chapters that follow turn to rhetorical practices—translation, imitation, and analogy—to posit “Arctic rhetoric,” and, in positing the question, to repose the question of rhetoric in advance. I take up the question of translation in detail in Chapter 1.

4. Enablement

Enablement, as we have already seen, is (in) granting.231 Already we have come upon two of its names: rhythm and finitude. In Chapter 1, rhythm is the non-apprehensive modulation of world, “of” time in the sense, opening to the granting of fields of emergent temporality that are intensive, immanent inhabitations of the old and the new. Rhythm, then, is the spacetime of the future, “secreted” by the world of inter-action. We are of rhythmicity, which rhythms us, and, in being-rhythmed, grants passage to sharing-in- relation.

5. Granting

231 Consider for example what Hobbes called the “Nutrition” or nourishment of the sovereign, “that is to say, the Common-wealth (whose person he representeth)” (191). The representational body of the sovereign is nourished by the environment in which it “consisteth” (188) and thus must engage with the “Plenty of Matter” (189), its natural resources, given by Nature as the “Nutriment” of “Animals, Vegetals, and Minerals” of the “Land, and Sea” which are either “neer to the face of the Earth” or “received” through labour (189). Hobbes goes on to describe the production and collection of commodities both “Native, that which is to be had within the Territory of the Common-wealth” and “Forraign, that which is imported from without” (ibid). The distribution of “the Materials of this Nourishment,” which is to say the “Propriety,” or property, is done according to the Laws (190-91). Hobbes continues, describing privatization of lands and resources, taxation, and the “Concoction” of commodities to “some thing of equall value, and withal so portable, as not to hinder the motion of men from place to place,” which is to say the creation of exchange value and the logic of its circulation. Thus the “Sanguification of the Common-wealth: For natural Bloud is in like manner made of the fruits of the Earth; and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member of the Body of Man” (193). The nourishment is toward the circulation of the commonwealth, keeping the individual components of representation living as the production of the economy, financial institutions, and “Conduits and Wayes” that “Conveyeth it to the Publique Coffers” and “that Issueth the same out againe for publique payements” through “Collectors, Receivers, and Treasurers … [and] Officers appointed for payment of severall publique or private Ministers” (194). In this way, then, for Hobbes, the emergence of production, exchange, and circulation is how “the Artificiall Man maintains his resemblance with the Naturall; whose Veins receiving the Bloud from severall Parts of the Body, carry it to the Heart; where being made Vitall, the Heart by the Arteries sends it out again, to enliven, and enable for motion all the Members of the same” (ibid). Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that the enablement of this motion, the progeny of enablement “are those we call Plantations, or Colonies” (ibid). The enablement of representation is the gathering of the Earth. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).

Granting is (in) the open of passage. We have already seen how enablement is given of

the worldly rhythm to which rhetoricity claims in advance. In the Arctic, this enablement

is a worldly rhythm of withdrawal and retreat, of the end and the open. I have suggested

that, enabled of the end, the opening; and so the name and the human being. In Chapter

2, I take up the question of imitation as a rhetorical enablement, rhythmicity, of finitude.

Finitude, as I have already suggested in part, is the granting of what in this dissertation I

name “sharing-in-relation,” which answers from the future, which expects us in the

common. Philippe-Joseph Salazar asks: “Ways of prediction, ways of rhetoric?”232 The way, the prediction, the rhetorical: all bear upon the medium of “generation,” a spacetime which is the coming-to-be as the making and marking of the “pre-diction” of Λόγος

(logos) hopelessly toward δόξα (doxa). This is a “toward” doxa because, for Salazar, prediction is a particular “way of rhetoric” called “politics,” toward-the-secret, the secret that names what ultimately he will judge as a “Time” that does not exist.233 Prediction and forecasting therefore disclose two things: first, that doxa is the “will to name”234 whose infinite extent is to “have reason at all costs,” and which moves “in” where the socius is—whether social network or public life—as the imitation of what it would have; second, prediction—both as forecast and the anticipatory self-disclosure of logos—is the analogical “way” of Time. The three “canonical times of persuasion,” known since

Aristotle as the branches of oratory—forensic (past), epideictic (present), and deliberative

(future)—are in Salazar’s terms matters of analogy, “analogical processes,” that “use tense as a way to time.”235 By evoking doxa and political life, the tensing of time in the

232 Philippe-Joseph Salazar, “Ways of Prediction, Ways of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017), 390. 233 Ibid, 403. 234 Ibid, 402. 235 Ibid, 398.

analogical process of forecasting, which rhetoricity is both complicit in and charged with

suspending,236 Salazar is casting the analogy of time into the imitation of the sovereign,

to which rhetoric is secretly complicit.

Massimo Cacciari agrees,237 though in different terms, with Salazar’s claims.

Worldly sovereignty, as Cacciari puts it, ought to be apprehended within the “orientation

or political finality immanent to religious life”238 that composes it: of the katechōn or the great withholding of the end-times. “Such is the sense of apocalyptic time: in every instant every individual is called to decision; in every instant they are called to decide in the face of an ultimate either/or face to face with the eschaton: whether to live wholly in the truth of the Event or believe entirely in the ‘energy of deception’.”239 So enfutured,

reckoning the present as a constellation of always-immanent decisions about the

promised future (a charge no doubt extremely familiar to the critics of neoliberalization),

the future-citizen—recast in Salazar’s terms as (enfutured) doxa—becomes a “future

citizenship”240 for which “the auctoritas,” the “inaugurating” or inventive power,

“belongs essentially to whoever has raised the sword for eschatological time against every preceding ‘state’.”241 As the mediation of political power, qua representation,

presents a persistent aporia to the artifice, or imitation, of the sovereign242 and the auctoritas remains inexhaustible to that representation, there is an “ontological insecurity” that persists in the katechon—the (political) ends that hold this futurity, citizenship, and

236 Ibid, 403. 237 Massimo Cacciari, The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology, translated by Edi Pucci (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 238 Ibid, 2. 239 Ibid, 4. 240 Ibid, 5. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid, 7.

life as a decision-making—that “can never be thoroughly predicted.”243 Contra claims like these, John Muckelbauer, who is treated in detail in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, has argued that doxa isn’t contained, whether as a process of tensing time or in the katechon’s (with-) holding of life, “fistlike”244 in-itself, any more than doxa stands as an identity to be fully distinguished.245 If for Salazar politics is a (falsely pre-dictive) seeking

of the secret of Time that resolves into the structural impossibility of waiting for what it

can’t achieve, Muckelbauer retorts that politics is a “process of singular extraction” non-

distinct or inseparable from “the process of generalization,”246 which is to say doxa is the

“singular rhythm” of an immanent mobilizing force of dialectical oppositions, a

“resonance” with what structures doxa to begin with—what he names the common.247

Doxa, in Muckelbauer’s terms, is a rhythm of what grants. Are Salazar and Cacciari

terribly far from this view? Salazar suggests that doxa “fabricates the objects of its

parlêtre,” which is to say the analogies (and imitations) of time, “in order to keep alive

the deception that public affairs are governed by secrets and predictions.”248 And as for

Cacciari, the civis futurus is the “plural power”249 of the katechōn even though this is an

“open and irrepressible asymmetry that is intolerable for [the] imperial power” that is its

constitutive representation.250 Said another way, for both, doxa is the imitative granting

of doxa. Recall that Muckelbauer’s focus on doxa is to show “the common dimension of

the future [that] refers,” of doxa, “to an orientation toward emergence itself.”251 For

243 Ibid, 11-12. 244 Ibid, 11. 245 Muckelbauer, Future, 151. 246 Ibid, 156. 247 Ibid, 162. 248 Salazar, “Ways,” 406. 249 Cacciari, Withholding, 41. 250 Ibid, 36. 251 Muckelbauer, Future, 165.

Muckelbauer the future represents the “indication” of emergence; for Salazar, the

“nonsecret,”252 as the de-generation of posited Time in linear sequence, is the only future

for rhetoric or politics; and for Cacciari, the auctoritas is the (unrepresentable) invention

that grounds the anomie of the eschatological future of doxa. In this sense, whether

named prediction or katechon or indication, doxa names the constitutive imitation of

movement, of the enablement, of granting. As an imitative process of rhetoricity, “the

future” settles as the granting of passage.

6. Passage

Passage is the movement of what grants. Chapter 3 takes up the question of the

movement of the passage through rhetorical analogy. This chapter marks a significant

departure from Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, taking the passage, as analogy, to constitute

the practice of rhetoricity. Therefore, as the granting of the passage, the casting forward

as the movement into the open of the granting, analogy is approached less as an object of

study and more as a practice of rhetoric. In the Arctic, the analogy takes the form of the

image.

Analogy is ancient to the study of rhetoric, qua analogia, as in the form of

similarity or exemplarity.253 Many scholars had, by 1976, focused on the enthymeme, the argument of the unstated premise, over the function and status of the example. Scott

Consigny, “following Aristotle,” argues that the example facilitated “case-to-case reasoning” in situations,254 even despite those situations, where rules and rule-governed

252 Salazar, “Ways,” 403. 253 Scott Consigny, “The Rhetorical Example,” Southern Journal of Communication 41, no. 2 (1976), 121-132. 254 Ibid, 123.

conventions didn’t or couldn’t apply.255 That is to say the “rhetorical example” convenes

an inventive capacity for discovery where there is no systematic or scientific path to

follow—the example, following Consigny (following Aristotle), facilitates rhetoricity as

such—at least in the well-worn Aristotelian path of accessing the “available means” of

persuasion, wherein in the access is in some sense also the persuasive “facilitation” as the

example. Later, Samuel McCormick256 will argue that scholars of this exemplary focus will have narrowed too much into the example qua Aristotelian paradeigma—more of a spatial etymology drawing to the side-by-side, the indication, the pointing-out— ironically losing sight of other important terms for the rhetorical example, such as the

Latin exemplum, whose etymology reaches into negative space—cutting, subtracting, excepting, freeing.257 Or, as McCormick has it, into the “hypothetical, contentious,” as with Aristotelian parabolē, “indirect, interrogative,” as with the Ciceronian collatio, the shift from the Greek to the Latin of “bringing together,” but also debate, discussion, and opposition,258 and the “frequently deceptive,”259 as with Quintilian’s similitudo, “a

liminal zone between sameness and difference.”260 For Cicero, who “inherits” the

persuasion and violence, and therefore the politics of Aristotelian example by comparison

(parabolē), the relation of comparison and the “narrative typology”261 of their likeness

determine the outcome of the staging, the discussion, and the encounter. So there is a

“toggling” between persuasion and violence given by the likeness of the comparative

255 Ibid, 128. 256 Samuel McCormick, “Argument by Comparison: An Ancient Typology,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 32, no. 2 (2014), 148-164. See also G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 257 Ibid, 148-149. 258 Ibid, 153. 259 Ibid, 150. 260 Ibid, 160. 261 Ibid, 164.

turns. It’s only with Quintilian’s “master trope” of similitudo, argues McCormick, that

resemblance is given alongside deception in “varying degrees.”262 The possibility for

deception—in both giving and receiving the comparison—is what suggests the

comparative relation, not to dissimilarity and dissimilation,263 but rather dissemblence and dissimulation.264

“Taken together,” concludes McCormick, “these rhetorical and political functions

further suggest that arguments by comparison occupy and maneuver within a spectrum of

analogies.”265 Noah Roderick will agree,266 but for different reasons. In Chapter 3 I will have drawn out through Deleuze that there is another analogical rhetoric of asymmetricality that moves through the interface. Asymmetry names the relation between things and change. In an asymmetrical relationship there is no “symmetrical” relation between identity and difference, change, or invention. Many different terms occupy this discourse: intensivity, immanence, “yes, yes,” or Thomas Nail’s more recent kinopolitical ontology of motion.267 Asymmetry is a condition of movement where the constitutive problem is identity, presence, or the correlation between subject and object.

But self-similarity, in Roderick’s reading, is a causal function of repetition, not opposed to self-same, but rather to the shadows of the same.

Roderick wants to say, alongside Graham Harman, that the “form of an object for others is neither its real qualities nor the real object itself.”268 But in making this claim, he

262 Ibid. 263 Ibid, 162. 264 Ibid, 164. 265 Ibid. 266 Noah Roderick, The Being of Analogy (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016). 267 See Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); Theory of the Border (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Being and Motion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Theory of the Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 268 Roderick, Analogy, 64.

is forced into asking whether there is some “further symmetry” through which the object

endures as a formal identity. A familiar analogue in rhetoric is Thomas Rickert’s ambient

rhetoric. Its Heideggerian inflections and devotions mean that there is a continuous

“withdrawal,” such that rhetoric is an emergent ontology grounded in the material

affordances from which it conditions.269 This is what Rickert calls a continuous

disclosure of material conditions variously revealed and withdrawn. As Rickert himself

makes abundantly clear, rhetoricity is a worldly given “attuned” to “relationality,

conditionality, and withdrawal,”270 those “relations of all relations … as the condition of possibility for how things come to be as they are”271 so as to “further disclose … to grant

[the] profound conditioning in all that we do and all that is.”272 In this sense, even

technological design attunes and inflects “our sense of bodily inhabitance and the cradle

of intelligibility within which we comport ourselves”273 so that it is never merely intentional, and our relations to it are never merely subjective: “attunement,” or mood,

“might be more akin to the rhythm of everyday life.”274 Roderick interjects to ask: “but into what does it withdraw?”275 Both seem to find in withdrawal either a move into “a cold cavern of nothingness” or the Deleuzian “furnace of flux.”276 Instead, Roderick wants to suggest what an object does in withdrawal is conceal “the starting point by which it can be grasped.”277

269 Rickert, Ambient, xii. 270 Ibid, 204. 271 Ibid, 218. 272 Ibid, 285. 273 Ibid, 155. 274 Ibid, 146. 275 Roderick, Analogy, 64. 276 Ibid. 277 Ibid.

Thus Roderick’s retort to Difference and Repetition278 submitted to a single

sentence: “Synthesis always comes after similarity,”279 what can also be called the

materialist rejoinder that takes form by way of analogy. Take for example Thomas Nail’s

theory of the image, which posits the basic structure of the image as “kinetic” so it is

movement “not representation, [that] has always been central to the image.”280 Ergo the image, falsely accused of representation, stasis, or imitation—“an expression or production of something else”281—has missed that the image was always first a reflection,

a duplication, or a fold.282 If Roderick’s rejoinder can be rephrased to “repetition always comes after analogy,” then we might recognize that Nail’s claim, “all images are sensuous,” will follow “all sensations are images” in the sense that there is no image without what grants it.283 For Nail, kinesis, or the “kinesthetic regime,” precedes in-

being-motion, as the primacy of (“their”) motion.284 So if there is anything novel about the “age of the image” in which we live, it isn’t going to be found in the explosive capacity for global transmission and exponential growth, for the image is only that which is granted by the “creative pedesis and feedback of the electrical flow itself: its generative power.”285 Novelty is the hybridization of previous kinetic regimes, revealed with (of) the

“discovery” of the electromagnetic field. What the digital image reveals is not the image, but novelty as such, the expression of the repetition of hitherto unannounced features of

278 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 279 Roderick, Analogy, 250, emphasis mine. 280 Nail, Image, 361. 281 Ibid. 282 Ibid, 362. 283 Ibid. 284 For, it must be recalled here, that motion qua reflection and fold and duplication is always a local phenomenon. The question of locality and non-locality is also one of Roderick’s central conceits of similarity-before-synthesis. 285 Ibid, 363.

the image—such as “the capacity to manipulate electrical flows”286—which for Nail constitutes the sensual, and therefore distributed extension of non-locality of imaging to the nonhuman, to being, to world. We find the image nonrepresentational in retrospect and granting the future of the material agency of the image in the sense of the world:

“The entire history of the image,” which is nothing more than the variegated expressions of the electromagnetic field, “coexists with the function, form, relation, and difference that defines all aesthetic fields”287 in which the image “takes place as a series of

bifurcations, knots, and weavings in this field.”288

Binary, key to code and the digital, is usually defined by the “or,” the on or off,

open or closed. The digital image, it would appear, distinguishes itself from the light of

Barthes’ dead mother, stilled, held forever as the mysterious unrepresentable child in the

attic of his text, by being subject to binary. But as Nail argues, binarization is not the “or”

of binary but, to return to Roderick, of predication: “each key introduces a ripple or

modulation into the constant flow of electrons in the transistor series, which produces an

enormous amount of other oscillations.”289 Being reduced, as Nail puts it, to this binary

difference in the transistor is already a matter of hybridization of the flow of matter for

which binary is preceded by its “basic material condition.”290 And matter it-self is non-

reducible as such to an ontological ground or empirical definition,291 for matter is a

kinetic process. It is this process that is shared between Roderick and Nail, and indeed the

material rhetoricities of, at, in the end of the world—the passage from sense to sensorium, where the former designates the objectivity of form, and the latter the distributed and

286 Ibid, 323. 287 Ibid, 324. 288 Ibid. 289 Ibid, 327. 290 Ibid. 291 Ibid, 20.

nonlocal flow of movement (rhythm), translation (imitation), and negotiation (analogy).

In the most radical sense, the image waited for analogy: not a description of determinism, no more than a mirror of Muckelbauer’s claim that we are forced to repeat. Rather, the analogical as (of) the in advance of what waits for the granting of its passage. With this, the dissertation concludes.

7. Chapter and Style Breakdown

Chapter 1: Arctic Rhetoric: The End of the Arctic, the Future of Baffin Bay

In Chapter 1, I engage the Baffin Bay seismic survey proposal before the Supreme Court of Canada, specifically the social media campaign propelled by Clyde River, Nunavut in alliance with Greenpeace. Situating the campaign in the turning toward the Arctic in the era of climate change, as “the end of the Arctic,” and Greenpeace’s rhetorical staging of the apocalyptic effects of the future of the project if moved from proposition to reality,

Chapter 1 offers an extended encounter with the stakes of material, ecological, and posthuman rhetoricity at the end of the Arctic and in the end of the world, plotted through and emerging the figure of enablement in the misreading of the word “sovereignty” in

Inuktut.

Chapter 2: Life and Death of the Body of the Seal

In Chapter 2, the Inuit social media campaign #sealfie is approached through the question of imitation and finitude. Locating imitation both in the “common” and the body of the living seal at the end of the Arctic, given in the context of the European Union ban

61 on the sale of sealskin products, ostensibly in protection of the “baby seal,” this chapter

emerges the constitutive terms of granting in the imitation of life and death of the body of

the seal.

Chapter 3: printf(“Inuit”);

Chapter 3 deserves an extended brief on its contexts and style. I will therefore expand,

without naming, the form that the chapter takes. Then, I will offer a minor contextualization of code, not as a supplementary literature review, but rather as a guide through which the wagers may become familiar by implication.

Thematically and formally, Chapter 3 stages the stakes of the question of code and emerging digitalization in the territory of Nunavut. Code, imagined as the future of

mind and economy, has recently been linked to suicide prevention strategies in a territory

marked by the “crisis” and “emergency” of suicide. Linking the passage of the atiq and

tarniq to the rebirth in the namesake and tradition with the emergence of code, Chapter 3

practices a rhetorical bodily-discourse where the question of code, as analogical,

encounters the being of the return without encounter in the “body” of the text. In this

sense, the footnotes are often speaking to the body that can’t seem to hear it. The title of

Chapter 3, printf(“Inuit”);, gestures to the future of an inbuilt format string parameter in

programming languages like C, “used to print the ‘character, string, float, integer, octal and hexadecimal values’ onto the output screen.”292 The title of the chapter, therefore,

gestures to the question of the image, the passage of inhabitancy and representation. I

292 See “C—printf and scanf,” Fresh and Refresh, accessed at: https://fresh2refresh.com/c-programming/c-printf-and- scanf/.

take this up at the interface, analogically, on the canvas and in the dream, to emerge the passage of the in advance that waits.

I will now, finally, offer a short supplementary discussion of the broader context of code, in citation to the rhetorical form of Chapter 3.

Chapter 3: Further discussion

What is code? As with the question “What is sovereignty?”293 the answer is in excess of the capacity for response. But it’s this relation of these questions that I seek to draw out in Chapter 3, and I spend some time defining the ways in which technē and code have been understood by contemporary Indigenous new media artists and coders. While the chapter has suspended taking on some of the “core principles” that “underpin the practices of coding,”294 those of procedures and expressions, Cox and McLean locate coding within the paradoxical nontotality of expression in general. Programming operations, which “oscillates between process and expression,” are “prone to bugs and failure, and in significant ways can be considered to be out of control,295 like speech.”296

Ergo code, given in the simile of speech, placed within the broader network in which its

“command and control” protocols are executed, nonetheless “produces ambiguities and

293 I take up this question in Chapter 1, in advance of its non-apprehensive movement. In Chapter 3, I’m asking whether it’s possible to make the same demand on code. 294 This isn’t exactly true. I do briefly touch on the concept of “Indigitalization,” or Indigenous coding architecture and logic. 295 Mario Blaser has made a similar argument about what he calls an Indigenous “political ontology,” whose rhetoric, if I may call it that, is a “political sensibility” insofar as it names the writing of a “reality-making, including its own participation in reality-making” (55). This “way of worlding” is a seeking, what “seeks to be hospitable to the notion of multiple ontologies” (54). On the one hand, this names worlding as a method of seeking, nested extensively into world without World into which all ontology finds it-self. On the other hand, the “seeking” of the “way” means that some ontologies can fail to enact through story, speech, practice, and so on. Blaser’s political ontology, I submit, is therefore an analogy for code and all that this implies. See Mario Blaser, “Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Heterogeneous Assemblages,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 49–58. 296 Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, Speaking Code: Code as Aesthetic and Political Expression (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 6.

63 possibilities of recoding its prescriptive and deterministic tendencies”297 and, like all codes, “is inherently unstable” as “both a computer-readable notation of logic and a representation of this process, both script and performance.”298

Take, for instance, their claim that Donald E. Knuth had, by 1968, already

“emphasized the depth of the relationship between writing a computer program and the

logic that underpins it,” and so “acknowledge[d] programming to be somewhat like

composing poetry or music.”299 In fact, what Knuth actually wrote was that programming

“can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.”300 The difference between the “acknowledgement” of programming as “somewhat like” the composition of music or poetry, and, in Knuth’s words, the potential for the aesthetic experience that is much like that composition is crucial in Chapter 3, and occurs in the terms of analogy.

Cox and McLean, for their part, want to argue here that while the “conventions of writing and reading” should be reckoned as part of the “coded systems of input and output,” the formal logic that underpins the command and execution, the “procedural way of doing things.”301 But it’s precisely this inroad that Knuth is responding to with the potential for aesthetic experience, and why he thinks that coding is therefore constituted within the horizon of an aesthetic potential. In the building of the algorithm, Knuth writes that “we want algorithms that are good in some loosely defined aesthetic sense.”302 Two potential

criteria for the loosely “aesthetic sense” of algorithmic goodness are the rapidity with

which algorithm “performs” itself and its adaptability to nonlocal systems. In other words,

297 Ibid, 3. 298 Ibid. 299 Ibid, 8. 300 Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms, 3rd ed. (Upper Sadle, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 1997), v. 301 Cox and McLean, Code, 41. 302 Knuth, Art, 7.

in quite traditional mathematical terms, analogous perhaps to the cliché of the equation, the algorithm should seek optimal “simplicity and elegance.”303 We might take for example John Cheney-Lippold’s version of celebrity, the “emergent way” of celebrity304 that is defined not by the relation of culture to identity, as a mode of consumption or recognition, but rather as a facilitation of a legal mandate—in this case the EU’s personal information take-down requests305—that, in turn, serves as a “new index for who legally has the ‘right to be forgotten’” and who does not.”306 As Cheney-Lippold would argue, this fundamentally “reworks our ideas around identity.”307 By this, the author means not the thinking subject that constructs the “who,” but the “what” that “data is made to say about us.”308 In this sense, celebrity is an algorithmic authentication of rhythms, patterns, and all that concerns self. What is worthy of notice here is not only the way that in studies of digital identity, here understood broadly in the algorithmic sorting and

303 Take for example Knoth’s discussion of the Euclidean φ, the “extreme mean and ratio”: “the ratio of A to B is the ratio of A+B to A, if the ratio of A to B is φ” (Knuth 80). This, the “divine proportion” according to Renaissance thinkers, or more familiarly, the “golden ratio.” Knuth continues: “Many artists and writers have said that the ratio of φ to 1 is the most aesthetically pleasing proportion, and their opinion is confirmed from the standpoint of computer programming aesthetics as well” (ibid). It is in this sense that Knuth is expressing the aesthetic of programming: simplicity and elegance as a matter of proportion. It’s precisely in this sense, then, that we return to the question of analogy through different means. Still, it’s worth noting that the authors do situate the aesthetic dimension of code beyond the brevity and elegance of its operation—as, for example, in the nonexecutable code of so-called “doublecode,” where code lines are written in nonrecognizable ways, or in “obfuscated code contests, where it is clear that program code has an aesthetic dimension that extends beyond the conventions of programming which stress the efficiency and brevity of source code” (9). I would contend, however, that even these nonrecognizable or obscure programming languages or arrangements are analogous relations to the production of code as an exercise in execution: without execution there is no recognition of code as a programming language in the first instance. Even in the disruptive aesthetics, as with infinite loops—which the authors argue “reflects the disruptive capacity of critical aesthetics to comment on the operations and effects of computational processes more broadly” (10)—the “excessive” relation code is given in the analogical relation of aesthetic experiment, the dialectical other of operation, and the “main referent” of spoken language (12). In this way code becomes (analogic), settled within the relation of human expression and its negations, re-encoded into the “symbiotic” relation of human (language) and machine (language), to follow (in) Linklider’s terms, and therefore anticipates its own protocols even where it would be but is not. As it happens, when the authors write that their book “is not intended to be philosophy or theory as such,” but rather a form of practice (12), they are executing the analogy that constitutes the book’s theory of code to begin with: what obtains between x and y (the “linguistic analogies between code and natural languages” [12], the establishment of speech becoming “more codelike under the conditions of informational capitalism” [13], and so on). 304 John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2018), xii. 305 Ibid. 306 Ibid. 307 Ibid. 308 Ibid.

aggregation of data—whether in relation to the legal standards of the state, for example,

or in general as an always-online-condition of upload—the question of identity moves

from “who” to “what.” This move itself is significant; in the way the flower suggests the

loam. That is to say, it is not only a matter of how identity comes to mean something in

the face of data and algorithm, but that identity is stable position, as identity, that can be

coded from who to what.

Identity in the context of this medium is fundamentally interpretive. But the terms

of this interpretation are proprietary and, at last, privatized, what’s called an “algorithmic

interpretation” that decides “who we are computationally calculated to be.”309 And so

identity is not only lost as a form of self-recognition or authenticity, but recast beyond the

processes of use and collection. Cheney-Lippold uses the example of gender, wherein

“Google’s gender,” its interpretive representation of my gender-as-x, is given in an

“illegible”310 distance from my “lived experience.”311 The algorithmic-identity therefore is posited to introduce an epistemological and ontological abyss between the real and the virtual, traversed only by the operations of capital that are “increasingly efficacious for those who are using our data to market, surveil, and control us.”312 The invention of algorithmic identity is thereby defined according in reference both to the unknown of the

309 In Cheney-Lippold’s Foucauldian reading, which situates this predictive algorithmicity in the context of governmentality—an “algorithmic governmentality,” following Antoinette Rouvroy (5)—it isn’t just identity as such that “we” lose hold of, but “how life itself is defined” (ibid). Given this framework, the day-to-day use of the Internet and always-online devices ultimately translates, through a vast interpretive mechanism, to the “schizophrenic” projection in data of multiple selves, of “an almost innumerable collection of interpretive layers” by “hundreds of different companies and agencies identifying us in thousands of competing ways” (ibid). And so we are led to believe that the “stable, singular truth of identity … is truly a relic of the past” (6). This “pastness” is so because identity changes “minute by minute, byte by byte” (7). See also Antoinette Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism Versus Due Process,” Privacy Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja de Vries (New York: Routledge, 2013), 143- 167. . 310 Ibid, 8. 311 Ibid, 7. 312 Ibid, 8.

proprietary, what is beyond subjective apprehension, and a shift to the “temporality” of

subjectivity.313 Algorithms and massive data aggregation process data at “near real-time”

and these interpretive processes “become the new.”314

I will intrude on this point. On the one hand, perhaps there is no doubt that the

introduction of the new (technē) has a radical effect on world, which includes

“temporality.” On the other hand, now Cheney-Lippold is beholden to identity-as-

category that’s acted upon by qualitative modulation and quantitative manipulation. This

is partially consistent with the abstracted virtual “algorithmic identity” that is the

production of real-world processes of the human use of technology. But it also means a

secondary division between the virtual and the real. With identity split into real and

virtual, non-identificatory real-world processes act on the virtual such that, in return, it

affects the real-identity (as indices) of the world where those processes produce the data

to (re-)construct the virtual (proprietary) identity of the algorithm. Significantly, for

Cheney-Lippold, this partially means that real-world-identity is non-translatable to code,

or, in his words, becomes “utterly unintelligible as ones and zeroes.”315 In this way, the virtual identities emerge as “algorithmic caricatures”316 that aren’t, even can’t be, “what

they say they are.”317 So: the problem here isn’t only that the social construction of identity is being imperfectly translated into the virtual, but that the translation is never an analogue for identity in the first place. The analogy of the Google-identity is to capital, hidden behind the proprietary black box of “near-real-time” aggregation and interpretation, where the social construction of knowledge can’t unify with the “technical,

313 Ibid, 9. 314 Ibid. 315 Ibid, 11. 316 Ibid, 10. 317 Ibid.

quotation-marked constructions of knowledge” to allow for the possibility of “essential

truths.”318 Without becoming lost in “essential truths” of identities, we might still ask: what is near real-time, in this sense? Or more complicated, “near-real-time”?319 It seems intuitive to respond that real-time refers to the lived, phenomenal experience of world as- it-happens, and that “real-time” interpretation would gesture to the simultaneity of the interpretive-evental. Indeed, Cheney-Lippold responds with precisely this claim in a note to the use of this term, arguing that “near real-time” is meant “to provide some temporal leeway to definitions of an immediate present.”320 Near (-) real-time, then, refers to the

(shrinking) lag between the event (of data production) and the processes of interpretation that are productive of this other-object called “identity” that distinguishes from the real- identity of real-time upon which events are (phenomenologically) processed. And so we are to imagine a user who in the real-world has a real-identity that in some sense persists while surfing a series of websites that, in so doing, shifts (into) the algorithmic identity of the “user”—from x-to-y-percent male, from male to female, from old to young, and so on.

In this sense the problem is (in) the shift from individual to “dividual”321 where the

“stable referent of identity”322 is finally lost in repetition. Yet, if it is lost in this way, in what sense has real-time persisted?

Such as it is, “time” is the one identity that appears completely immune to the algorithm—even if the “temporal leeway” of the “immediate present” is recognized to be the comparison between two data sets (present and past) in a particular process. The algorithm invents the subjectivity out of the process of data creation—in analogical

318 Ibid, 11. 319 Ibid, 30. 320 Ibid, 270. 321 Ibid, 238. 322 Ibid, 28.

reference to the presence of the real identity of-real-time—and moves, differentially, relative to the identity of time. In this way, “algorithm,” “process,” and “protocol” are all analogical relations to the identity of time that never loses its position relative to the real.

Among other things, this means that Inuit can be reasonably “located” in real-time so that their real-identity can act, analogically, as a failure lost in an always-moving-repetition-of translation of data (qua capital). Following this, sovereignty is both possible, in the real of real time and its identities, and always moving into the “future,” where another identity is made and re-made. “Inuit coding,” therefore, is not only impossible as an identity, but also impossibly coded to the identity of real-time. Drawing this out is important so to remark that, if online identities are otherwise than “what” we think they are, and if they are “recast” into the “private parlance” of capital or state power, there is a need to remain attentive to the way in which the “pastness” of that identity doesn’t move without itself occupying another “constellation.” If there is a “new” functional “unconcern” with the you-ness of you, however identified, the past of identity is not equivalent to the technē that emerges the futural, adjectival, form of this contemporary identity. So returns an

“Inuit temporality,” one that can be modulated (as with the predictive “shifting” of the future into the present) so as to “delimit” possibility, “reframe” knowledge, or

“extrapolate” an other future, sharing-in-relation to the “nearness” of “real-time.” So returns the anthropologist standing before the subject of care given in the image of the dream. It is with this return that I finally begin.

69 Methods

In the Introduction I wrote that the first significant way in which the claim that animates this dissertation is in conversation with Inuit philosophy is by privileging the connections that obtain over the immediacy of clarity or a relation to an uncontroversial, historical, or objective correctness. The second significant way may now be approached in the question of “methods.” A contribution to scholarly knowledge ought to demonstrate, which is to say to name and to cite, the cohesion of approach. The context is important here, for (this) writing stands in relation to administration and evaluation, therefore its naming must gesture, account, and situate. The “method” of methodology is procedural, in the sense of systematicity, but it is also μέθοδος (méthodos), the being-in-pursuit of recognition1:

μετᾰ́, the coming into, the being-among, the between, the common, the shared; and ὁδός, the path, the way, the threshold. These figures have been announced many times already and will be many times more. Must this repeat again? The rhetorical scholarship that I will attend to in this dissertation will answer in the affirmative.2

Recently, Patrick Belanger has staged rhetoric and Indigeneity in Canada together toward the goal of decolonization. As Belanger understands it, rhetoric is the “art of adapting communication to audiences to influence thought, feeling, attitude, or action.”3

Rhetoric “creates, sustains, and contests worldviews,” and therefore may be employed as a “tool for both colonial legitimation and decolonial struggle.”4 For Belanger, rhetoric,

1 I return to the figures of pursuit in Chapter 2 and recognition in Chapter 1. 2 See especially Chapter 1. 3 Patrick Belanger, Rhetoric and Settler Inertia: Strategies of Canadian Decolonization (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), 5. 4 Ibid.

70 situated “at the heart of ideology,”5 is imagined as a “bridge,” another bridge, always another bridge, between “conceptual and material worlds.”6 But this also means “rhetoric alone offers no quick solutions to intergenerational cultural and familial loss.”7 For

Belanger, then, we might have guessed, rhetoric is somewhere in the middle.8 This middle is not the Deleuzean middle that will return in Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and

Chapter 3. On the one hand, perhaps this is a “generative” rhetoric,9 in different senses.

Mailloux, for instance, defined rhetoric as the “political effect of trope and argument”10 and “in culture,”11 thereby linking figurative language and “persuasive action,” differently articulated depending on the historical context. For example, recall the task issued by

Cameron in the Introduction who argued that the facticity of knowledge matters less than “what it does,” what animates that knowledge in the first instance. This might be usefully restaged as the relation to the proposition. On the hand, the faithful reproduction of the proposition is perhaps the object of knowledge’s factical claim. On the other hand, rhetorical persuasion has a different relation to the proposition. Recall Gorgias who argued that logos can “bewitch the soul,”12 or Cicero who said speech is “designed to persuade,” to “move” (movere) us,13 as Burke also describes.14 That is to say, persuasion

5 Ibid, 6. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid, 7. 8 Ibid, 4. 9 “It is important in an age in which fixed forms—whether in metaphysics, art, poetics, cultural patterns, and so forth— are under attack, to look at the world from the perspective of invention, taken as the generation of something new,” and thus, the “human thrust” into the unknown. Robert Scott, “Report of the Committee on the Nature of Rhetorical Invention,” The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project, edited by Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1971), 229. 10 Steven Mailloux, Rhetorical Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 59. In part, this permits Mailloux a “rhetorical hermeneutics” that can move interpretation, literary or otherwise, into the “primal scene,” as Burke had it, of rhetoric (18). 11 Ibid, xii. 12 Gorgias, Encomium of Helen, translated by D.M. MacDowell (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1991). 13 Cicero, De Oratore, translated by E.W. Sutton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 130.

71 is the concern with the force of the proposition, and therefore, as Muckelbauer would have it, is an “asignifying” operation.15 Rhetoric as a mode of decolonization is therefore a compelling of action,16 a motivating force in line with the ancient tradition of rhetorical persuasion.

This might be understood as a “material-discursive” phenomenon of the rhetorical, as Danielle Endres has argued, insofar as it constitutes the “relational force” of interactions which encompasses the human and more-than-human world. “Critics can access these rhetorics,” continues Endres, “by focusing on rhetorical performances and practices, as well as on the consequences, or force, of rhetorical dissemination.”17 The struggles, landscapes, and rhetorics are in a kind of kinship, and therefore the “usual” conceptualization “in terms of the human”18 is both an important quality of the rhetoric, no less of its “conceptualization,” but also as a term of the human in the proposition itself.

This is to say, with more specificity, that the proposition comes to ground itself as human, a kind of rhetorical proposition that meets in a gathering space and “talks together.” The point here is to see how, propositionally and systemically, the terms of the human are in approach. Endres calls the more-than-human land community as having the “capability” of engaging in rhetoric, a capability that “may be inaccessible, undetectable, or foreign to some human beings.”19 Endres says that “thinking ecologically … avoids an exclusive

14 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 41. Burke goes on to say that rhetoric is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” (ibid), which can induce action (realistic functions of rhetoric) or induce motion (magical functions of rhetoric). The call, he said, is rhetorical (42). 15 John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 18. 16 Belanger, Rhetoric, 112. 17 Danielle Endres, “The Most Nuclear-Bombed Place: Ecological Implications of the US Nuclear Testing Program,” Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, edited by Bridie McGreavy et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 258. 18 Ibid, 259. 19 Ibid.

72 focus on either human or more-than-human, and, therefore, avoids the binary between the two.”20 But I can’t feel convinced that this is the case, or that binaries, pace Muckelbauer, can (or should) merely be “avoided,” precisely because the binary has been the object of the “middle” which de-polarizes. This speaks to a synthesis of the human and more-than- human, who retain two stable points so that their binary can be avoided in the “thinking” that is ecological.

Bradford Vivian has argued that technological or biomedical “affiliations between humans and machines, the rapid reorganization of time and space achieved by modern information networks,” and the questioning of the Enlightenment logic of universal political subjectivity have all prompted a significant questioning into the possibility of there being an essence to “human form or nature.”21 Such as it is, “ours is an epoch” wherein the “category” of human being must be approached with “an awareness” of the

“double meaning” of presence and process. Rhetoric stands as the traditional expression of human being: eloquence, speech, rationality, conduct, and persuasion. There is of course a long history of Indigenous speech and language being given in nonrecognition,22 recognizing only the animal “reaction,” by colonial powers.23 But as the authority of the

Aristotelian “capacity” of human being was challenged in the twentieth century, the universal human(ist) subject appeared already awash in its silent fading on the beaches of finitude.24 Vivian’s rhetoric, to this end, doesn’t want to abandon tradition—back between Plato and Isocrates establishing the inborn “moral benchmarks of reason, truth,

20 Ibid, 262. 21 Bradford Vivian, Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), ix. 22 I consider the rhetorical question of nonrecognition in Chapter 2. 23 See for example Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 55-88. 24 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 387.

73 and transparency”25 and the Aristotelian antistrophos subordinating rhetoricity to the dialectic, thus to moral instruction,26 and the emergence of the figure of the rhetor, who follows Cicero’s “ennobling” orator and Quintillian’s providential oratorial gift,27 to the

Augustinian logos of the true believer,28 all the way to the democratic and rational humanism of Bitzer, McKeon, and Scott in the 1960s29—so much as it wants to abandon the “lucidity of representation,” the capacity of questioning to return the human to it in representational form.30 For Vivian, rhetoric both uncovers the reproduction of what he calls “a metaphysical value system”31 that establishes and re-establishes oppositions— essence and appearance, truth and falsity, and so on—and demonstrates that their mere reversal doesn’t “counteract” the logic of the “system itself.”32

In this sense, it isn’t a choice to merely abandon the rhetor, not quite, as though this would move rhetoric into a more authentic relation to the real. Rather, rhetoric is, “by way of analogy,” the “in which” the subject, ethos, and so on, is distributed and emergent.

The words Vivian uses are “the rhetorical formation of multiple subjectivities … generated by the discursive practices that engender such categories and infuse them with meaning and value in social, political, and ethical contexts.”33 In this sense, rhetoric is a

“demonstration,” a “practice” of what engenders that rhetoric to begin with. It’s difficult

25 Vivian, Being, 3. 26 Ibid, 4. 27 Ibid, 5. 28 Ibid, 6. 29 Lloyd F. Bitzer’s well-known introduction of the “rhetorical situation” in 1968—the same year, it can’t be failed to note, that the Inuit political “awakening” is thought to have occurred—is evoked here, the calling of discourse into existence (3) by the rhetor who “creates” the real, objective, “rhetorical text” (11) of the “situation.” See Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968), 1-14. See also Richard McKeon, “Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity,” Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, edited by R.S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 147-175. 30 Vivian, Being, xii. 31 Ibid, 14. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid, 14-15.

74 to say precisely what, however, distinguishes that “demonstration” from the rhetoric itself, or whether the demonstration issues from the already multiple formations of extensive subjectivities. Perhaps it is text that binds us to these kinds of descriptions, and rhetoric of this sort—inherited from Derrida—is a practice of inhabiting the gap, the non- coincidence or the trace of what is “known to be” of text. In other words, rhetoric would name, and, in naming, name the naming-of. Vivian says something like this when he posits the “middle voice”34 of rhetoricity as the self-enactment of discourse no longer reducible to the subject that writes. Thomas Rickert offers a similar claim. We are, he says—and this “we” is central—“we are simultaneously given over to an affectability that precedes the symbolic,” which he calls “affectability” along with Diane Davis,35 though it might just as well take the name enablement, “and [be] granted leeway to find some measure of performativity within” its “abyssal grounds.” Following this, for he must, rhetoric “depends on neither knowledge nor consciousness but is given to emerge prior to them,” what he calls the hollowing out “in advance” of “what rhetoric will have come to be.”36

Rhetoric, then: the subject of writing. The vital point, that rhetoric is itself a method, of approach, in advance, which advances upon the approach—following in following. In many ways, this is harmonious with some of the claims of Inuit knowledge—emplaced, worldly, relational. But, as I will be arguing throughout this dissertation, it is precisely in

34 The “middle” returns many times in this dissertation. However, for another take on the middle voice, see Vitanza’s reading of the “competing” and “contradictory” voices of kairos, which Vitanza formulates as dispersion, and therefore the “self-overcoming” (287). It would suffice to suggest that Vitanza is in accord with Derrida in defining the middle voice as différance. Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 286-289. 35 Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). 36 What rhetoric will have come to be “for us as performance, as meaning, and as knowledge.” But this was already implied in the in-advance-of. See Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 284.

75 this sharing-in-relation that rhetoricity moves with “Inuit” qua human to the future that waits. Yet, as μέθοδος, this dissertation precisely inhabits the logics and concerns of rhetoricity broadly imagined here and in the chapters that follow. This is, then, a dissertation in the inheritance of the rhetoric it studies. But is this as Plato to the sophist?

What is it that we are really searching for when we undertake to hunt?37 Is it the inheritance?38 Is it a certain style of movement?39 Is it the resemblance of what tracks in the first place?40 Is it in the pursuit of distance itself, as the distinction between here and there, now and then, as the concept?41 Is the hunt not always the “particular style of futurity” that is the track of the outside in the tracking itself?42 Is this not the very name of the hunt, of μέθοδος? To all of these things I must, and do, return as the method. It would be easy to simply say that my dissertation extracts an object from a discourse through a case study with a particular lens. But as rhetoric suggests in advance that the how is in the what, I can only go so far along that pursuit, though I have made some gestures to it. But for this, then, I must return to the second significant way this dissertation is in conversation with Inuit philosophy, which I suggested but did not yet say anything about.

For many years now I have been apprehended, captured, or, in any case, have found myself returned to a lesson from elder Uqsuralik Ottokie43 from Kinngait, what used to be

37 This is not my question. “What is it we are really searching for when we undertake to hunt down the sophist and attach a lineage to him?” Muckelbauer, Future, 85. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid, 87. 40 Ibid, 89. 41 Ibid, 92. 42 Ibid, 96. 43 When asked in an interview to say a bit about herself, she responds that her name is Uqsuralik Uttuqi. The surname “Ottokie” is bracketed then privileged throughout the book. In the next question, she’s asked if she was ever married. She responds: “I had a husband a long time ago. My husband was Uttuqi” (25). On the question of the surname, see the section “The Name” in the Introduction. See Naqi Ekho and Uqsuralik Ottokie, Interviewing Inuit Elders Volume 3: Childrearing Practices, edited by Jean Briggs (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 2000), 25.

76 called Cape Dorset.44 Asked if unikkaqtuaat, the “old stories,” as the interviewer describes it, are still useful, Uqsuralik Ottokie responds: “The unikkaaqtuat are beneficial to children. At one time these stories were true, but because they are so old they just became stories.”45 Keavy Martin has drawn out how unikkaqqtuat are perhaps also best understood as stories that “go on for a very long time.”46 “When unipkaaqtuaq becomes a literary text,” she continues, “it becomes available for particular kinds of reading and engagement” that are outside the traditional protocols and purviews of the story as told.47

Martin understands, with many others who have been in approach to the Inuit, that these stories that go on for a long time are already in, as Martin put it, different skins.48 The stories used to be true, says Uqsuralik Ottokie, they used to be in the world in the way that the “self-enactment” and “material-discursivity” and enablement are of the worldly that we are all in advance. But now they are old, the unipkaaqtuaq are old in the world, and the world is otherwise, and so they are “just stories.” Martin also comments on this moment, reminding that the perceived veracity of the old stories varies from teller to teller.49 But I am not concerned here with the “veracity” of the story, or its perceived veracity. Throughout this dissertation, I find that I can’t speak for or as Inuit. But by saying it’s just a story, it’s clear that Uqsuralik Ottokie didn’t make a comment on its veracity—is the story true?—but rather on the passage of Inuit. The truth of the story is never in question, for all truths are stories in the passage. The truth of the story does not come to be recognized through the past as “just a story,” but rather that the truth of the

44 On the meaning of the word “Dorset,” see Introduction footnotes 7 and 68, returning again here in passing. 45 Ekho and Ottokie, Elders, 114. 46 Keavy Martin, Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012), 43. Important to reckon with is to whom and when the story belongs, for they “take place” in a time immemorial but move contextually with speaker and hearer (45). 47 Ibid. 48 This is a significant concern of Chapter 2. 49 Martin, Stories, 111.

77 story is in repetition of the story. The story is repeated because it is true, and it is true because there are those that repeat it as the story. This is not the repetition of difference; this is not the movement of the future enabled in the past; this is “just a story.”

I have another old book in my library where Dorothy Eber recorded and transcribed interviews with Pitseolak Ashoona, who is also from Kinngait.50 The book is filled with her art, art that she made to “earn money,” in turn telling the story of how “Cape Dorset” became an internationally recognized community of Inuit artists,51 and in turn telling the story of her life. She describes the travels made by her and her family toward Iqaluit in a sealskin boat. “But even in my childhood these sealskin boats were already disappearing,” she says. “My first memory of life is when we stopped in Lake Harbour, on our way back from Frobisher Bay to Cape Dorset, to buy a wooden boat. There were many there. It was while my father bought the wooden boat that I first saw houses and that I saw the first white man. I was scared.”52 “Only as a child,” she says, “was I ever in a sealskin boat, but

I have put these boats into my drawings.”53

50 She was born in Tujjaat, an island north of the entrance to Hudson’s Bay. 51 “I became an artist to earn money but I think I am a real artist.” No doubt this is the case. Pitseolak Ashoona, Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life, edited by Dorothy Eber (Montréal: Design Collaborative Books, 1971), 1. She ends her story this way, concerning making prints: “I am going to keep on doing them until they tell me to stop. If no one tells me to stop, I shall make them as long as I am well. If I can, I’ll make them even after I am dead.” For a comprehensive history of Inuit art, see Richard C. Crandall, Inuit Art: A History (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Ltd., 2000). 52 Ibid, 4. 53 Ibid, emphasis mine.

Chapter 1: Arctic Rhetoric: The End of the Arctic, the Future of Baffin Bay

The world is turned toward the Arctic. This turn is climatic, historical, and economic, but its gravity is the same: the end of1 the Arctic. Of course we know that this framing, “the end of the Arctic,” is not the only way to describe this “turn.” Rather, there is a contest of turns,2 among them “the scramble for the Arctic,”3 the “New Arctic,”4 the “Arctic

Opening,”5 the “Emerging Arctic,”6 and the “Future Arctic.”7 What these terms share in common in the turn-toward the Arctic is what the 2015 Arctic Human Development

Report calls a “mushrooming” and “dramatic increase in interest.”8 So in some sense all of these Arctics are kairotic Arctics, collisions of turns toward environment and human

1 Edward Struzik, “The End and the Beginning of the Arctic,” Ensia 24 December 2014, accessed at: https://ensia.com/features/the-end-and-beginning-of-the-arctic/. In what follows I will be putting some stress on the preposition, “of,” to highlight the ways that the end of the Arctic is both an empirical descriptor emerging from scientific, geopolitical, and sociological “data,”—which is to say quantity—and a material-temporal quality, both composing “of” rhetoricity, that indigenizes the “end” to “the Arctic.” 2 See for example The National Research Council, The Arctic in the Anthropocene: Emerging Research Questions (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2014). Among the Arctic turns 3 Richard Sale and Eugene Potapov, The Scramble for the Arctic: Ownership, Exploitation and Conflict in the Far North, (London: Francis Lincoln, 2009). See also: Klaus Dodds and Mark Nuttall, The Scramble for the Poles: The Geopolitics of the Arctic and the Antarctic, (Cambridge: Polity, 2016); Graham Huggan and Lars Jensen (eds.), Postcolonial Perspectives on the European High North: Unscrambling the Arctic, (London: Palgrave, 2016); Adriana Craciun, “The Scramble for the Arctic,” Interventions 11:1 (2009): 103-114. 4 Evengård, Birgitta, et. al (Eds.), The New Arctic (New York: Springer, 2015). 5 Lloyd’s, Arctic Opening: Opportunity and Risk in the High North (Chatham House: 2012), accessed at: http://library.arcticportal.org/1671/1/Arctic_Opening%2C_opportunity_and_risks_in_the_High_North.pdf 6 The Counsel on Foreign Relations, “Emerging Arctic” (2016), where opportunities and “potentials” of energy, resource, and transportation will be “unlocked” by the “thawing Arctic,” accessed: https://www.cfr.org/interactives/emerging-arctic?cid=otr_marketing_use-arctic_Infoguide%2523!#!/emerging- arctic?cid=otr_marketing_use-arctic_Infoguide%2523! 7 Edward Struzik, Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge (Washington: Island Press, 2015). 8 Nordic Counsel of Ministers, Arctic Human Development Report: Regional Processes and Global Linkages (Denmark, 2015): 33. This “rising interest” comes with what Jingchao Peng called “China’s rising presence” in the Arctic, claiming (“announcing”) itself as a “near Arctic state,” to attend to the primary interests of “the environment, energy resources and the new shipping route” so to “gear up to tap into” the emerging energy resources (AHDR: 36). In the 2018 China White Paper on the Arctic, what it names the “Arctic situation” is rendered a kind of de-situation, plotted throughout the world in what is “the shared future of mankind.” The central metaphor of this plot is a phase transition: the melting of ice into water. Climate change helps orient the most recurrent commonplace for nation-state “interest” in the “future of the Arctic.” The Northwest Passage returns again as the implicit granting of the commonplace, where the Arctic ocean becomes the “shared heritage of mankind.” The logic of this shared future looks like open water, a negative horizon to the principle of terra nullius. Ice therefore names a boundary, and the overcoming of this boundary, implicit to the end of the Arctic, is the enablement of the granting named future. See “China’s Arctic Policy,” The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, January 2018, accessed at: http://english.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2018/01/26/content_281476026660336.htm.

being on the scene of planetary resource extractive capitalism.9 These turns toward the

Arctic are because it is there—in the “emerging,” “new,” “future” Arctic—where the dialectic of “opportunity” and “crisis” is found. But what makes up what I call the “end of the Arctic” is the time and place where the Arctic would be but is not and continues not to be. I’ve offered only a pathetically small part of the visible spectrum surrounding that end into its void, but this is precisely because I will not, in fact I cannot, speak “of” the end of the Arctic.10 Yet it is by claiming this end “of” that some of the stakes of this reproduced is not and continues not to be is granted in advance.

“Once ice-bound, difficult to access, and largely ignored by the rest of the world,” opens The Arctic in the Anthropocene, “the Arctic is now front and center in the midst of many important questions facing the world today. Our daily weather, what we eat, and coastal flooding are all interconnected with the future of the Arctic.”11 What follows from this accounting of the future takes forms familiar to the Arctic. Then,

“yesterday,” the Arctic was outside, out there—out of the public imagination, of the law, of history, of politics, of the world, in myth, in story, in promise. But now this “then” is moved, defining not yesterday but an interconnected now and tomorrow of the future—of

9 I will make reference to the “Anthropocene,” but there are equally many turns to this turn. See, for example, Jason W. Moore, “Introduction: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 1-13. “The news is not good on planet Earth,” writes Moore (1). What he calls the “conditions of life on Earth” are changing rapidly, and there are crossings of multiple “planetary boundaries” (ibid). For Moore, as for posthumanist or ontological rhetorics, these crossings demonstrate—through a “new conceptual wind” (4)—that human organization is “more-than-human and less-than-social” (5). Part of this new wind, such as it is, asks how this organization limits the endless—for more it’s the endless “accumulation of capital” (ibid), but of course this extension of living organization, what he calls the “web of life,” is really about limits to endlessness. See also Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). 10 As Kathryn Yusoff rightly points out, the end of the world isn’t exactly novel to the worlds ended by imperialism, ongoing settler colonialism, and capitalist modernity. The Anthropocene is then no more than, in her words, a selective perspectivism. Yusoff calls forth the “voidings” of Anthropocenic discourse and all the ways that its projections of liberal apocalypse construct another geological erasure of race that is, perhaps, another “stake” in a different geological history. See A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 11 Arctic in the Anthropocene, 15, emphasis mine.

our and we, of the world.12 Climate change, insofar as it describes many crises, many ends of many worlds,13 is a broad attempt to persuade and convene, to turn a world toward two important facts about life in the 21st century. The first is that we are all finite beings at the mercy of habitability. The second is that our finitude and habitability are co- extensive. For this us to know the relation between finitude and habitability is, in turn, to know the points where they converge as matters of shared concern. Climate change moves “us,” in discourse and critique as much as in media circulation, in heat waves and floods, wildfires, migrations, and various other “stressors” to habitability constricting around the finitude of our “shared future.” Moving “us,” being moved, renders the stakes of this future deeply rhetorical.

And so rhetoric has turned too, or maybe it’s better to say that rhetoric is (in) an incessant re-turning.14 The most recent posthuman and ontological turns find kairos and invention as moving matter/s,15 chronos as immanent and rhythmic,16 persuasion as

12 There is of course consensus—from climate scientists and Arctic Indigenous peoples—on the “unprecedented” changes to the Arctic and a “trending away from its previous state and into a period of unprecedented change, with implications not only within but also beyond the Arctic.” Jason E. Box, et al., “Key Indicators of Arctic Climate Change: 1971-2017,” Environ. Res. Lett. 14.4 (2019): 13. See also: “The Caribou Taste Different Now”: Inuit Elders Observe Climate Change, edited by José Gérin-Lajoie, Alain Cuerrier, and Laura Siegwart Collier (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 2017); Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (2011), dir. Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro, Igloolik Isuma Productions and Kunuk Kohn Productions. http://www.isuma.tv/inuit-knowledge-and-climate- change/movie-noss. 13 Echoing Derrida, but also as Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro put it: “We do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the Anthropocene, in placing us in the perspective of an ‘end of the world’ in the most empirical sense possible … has sparked a veritable metaphysical anguish. This anguish,” they continue, becomes a declaration of the past in the form of nouveau ontology, speculative realisms, and new materialisms, all new in how old they are, a newly ancient “world of the worldless people.” See The Ends of the World (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 30. 14 Herbert W. Simons reminds that Richard Rorty argued in 1984 that “reconceptions” of “inquiry in the human science” is “marked by” turns (Turn vii), of which rhetoric was counted among the linguistic and interpretive, respectively. Simons’ collection, for its part, re-turns rhetoric as constitutive, more than a turn-of and in itself a turning: “there is no escape from rhetoric” (Turn 16). The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, edited by Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). 15 Debra Hawhee, “Kairotic Encounters,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, edited by Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 16-35. See also: Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 74-98. Rickert and Hawhee both link kairos with invention. Rickert, following Heidegger, argues that kairos “takes place,” it is a “gathering that springs forward” (Ambient 98) or otherwise emerges “emplaced” as the “kairotic situation” through (and as) “a complex of relations vitally enmeshed” (Ambient 90). Hawhee, similarly, argues that it is only through the emergence of “kairotic encounters,” an emergence that is the moving and mediating effacement in the Deleuzean “betweenness” of the emergence of rhetoric outside of the subjective and objective, which is to say in “rhetoric’s time,” (“Kairotic” 18), that

heliotropic,17 and rhetoric itself as ecological,18 “ambient,”19 and more-than-human.20 In all these ways of rhetoric, time and space are unified undivided matters standing without reflection in the cracked mirror of Cartesianism.21 This rhetoric is accounted as the effacement “of,” its putting-at-risk of what undoes it-self. Diane Davis has recently called this a rhetoricity “at” the end of the world.22 “To respect the radical ruptures and infinite heterogeneities between and among human, animal, vegetal (and more) ways of thinking and being requires,” she argues, “attending to a wild dissemination of differences obscured by the positing of a single, indivisible line between thinking and being,

‘authentic response’ and ‘mere reaction.’”23 The world is not only opened by this rhetoricity, but it is always also a cut, a demand that seeks the effacement of the subject and of world, and calls out that the terms of sovereignty are un/done, pulled apart in

“‘turns’ happen, ethoi emerge, and logos becomes action” (“Kairotic” 32). Part of what this means for this rhetorical turn, then, is that it shares in common with the various discursive and non-discursive, material turns toward the Arctic as co-constitutive turns. 16 Nicole T. Allen, “A Reconsidering Chronos: Chronistic Criticism and the First ‘Iraqi National Calendar,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 4 (2018), 361-383. 17 John Muckelbauer, “Implicit Paradigms of Rhetoric: Aristotelian, Cultural, and Heliotropic,” in Rhetoric Through Everyday Things, edited by Scott Barnett and Casey Boyle (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016), 30- 41. 18 Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, edited by Bridie McGreavy et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 19 Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric. What Rickert calls the “concept” of ambience turns out to be really a translation into a concept—not of ambience or periechon, but “given” into the “more vital quality” that Rickert means by ambience. That is, “not an impartial medium but an ensemble of variables, forces, and elements that shape things in ways difficult to quantify or specify” (7). This means that ambience is inseparable from the “worldly rhetoric” of which it is a part (8), and therefore calls out the “fundamental entanglement,” the non-static and dynamic unfolding of disclosure that is “attunement,” that shows “achievement of some sense of harmony or synchronicity would … be fleeting” (7). Ambient rhetoric never shows up to the sovereign. 20 John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 21 R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 162 22 Diane Davis, “Rhetoricity at the End of the World,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017), 431-451. 23 Ibid, 438. Worth noting here is that “authentic response” and “mere reaction” are parts of the limit that divide the human from the animal, and so toward the sovereign. For Hobbes, of course, a person is one who has, who can author “words and actions,” but in the sense that they can also represent (Leviathan 101). “For it is the unity of the representer,” he writes, of the covenant to the Sovereign, “not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one” (104). Derrida rightly points out that this imitative representation, a style of authentic response, is “attached by the skein of a double umbilical cord” to “lieu-tenance,” an incarnation of representation (Beast 55)—the unity of the representer. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994); Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 1, edited by Michel Lisse et al., translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).

advance by “irreducible rhetoricity, this mattering of responsivity that amounts to a structure” of what entails any being in excess of its “being as presence.”24

This rhetoric is all the way down to arche-, the time immemorial yes receding (in) to responsiveness qua survival: “this unconditional,” and even biological or genetic rhetoricity “without sovereignty.”25 Rhetorics “at the end of the world” therefore testify not only an end to world, but the (re)turn of rhetoric that remembers the terms of “world” are out (in) as “we” continually encounter rhetoric before language. Or as Derrida put it,

“Perhaps there never is a threshold … Which is perhaps why we remain on it and risk staying.”26 Rhetorical ontology “at” the end of the world, such as it is: plus d’un seul seuil, plus d’un seul seul,27 or, analogically, in the way Davis describes the Derridean trace—for what is the difference?—“the looming up here of a nonpresent there.”28

Similarly, according to Thomas Rickert, rhetoric is grounded in the material conditions from which it arises, in the “always ongoing disclosure of the world.”29 Rhetoric doesn’t

“dwell” in the subject, the speaker, the rhetor, the sovereign, but rather in the conditions that impel the continual disclosure and withdrawal of the grammar of lived experience.

Seen from these views (from here, there), the end of the Arctic is perhaps always a constellation of humanist claims about the ends of human worlds, symbolicity, and life,

“entangled” in the more-than-human interplay, in melting ice, narwhal migration patterns, perhaps even contaminants in flesh and water. But this end of the world is kairotic for rhetoric, as a kind of mirroring occurrence, as “this radicalization of the rhetorical text”

24 Ibid, 439. 25 Ibid, 441. 26 Derrida, Beast Vol. 1, 334. 27 Ibid. 28 Davis, “Rhetoricity,” 442. 29 Rickert, Ambient, xii.

(that we are) is posed with a “profound urgency … since it now seems that what’s left of world is at stake in it, as is the survival of a habitable planet.”30 Rhetoricity is of the end of the world at the time when habitability, we are told, is constricting. In this constriction around finitude, the Arctic shares with this narrative of rhetoricity an end “of,” but it also shares a “being posed with,” as this profound urgency variously turns toward the Arctic— the bellwether,31 the canary,32 the laboratory.

Following these turns, this essay posits the end of the Arctic as an enablement of sovereignties that takes place in the future.33 I will argue that a rhetoricity “at the end of the world” abandons the sovereign, yes, but only to the future, where the end of the Arctic emerges as a granting. Both John Muckelbauer and Barbara Biesecker have argued, in different ways, that it isn’t always possible to respond to a problem by seeking the answer—Muckelbauer called it “misdirection”34 from the problem, and Biesecker called

30 Ibid, 433. 31 Rob Heubert et al., “Climate Change and International Security: The Arctic as a Bellwether” (Arlington, Virginia: Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, 2012). Available at: https://www.c2es.org/publications/climate-change- international-arctic-security/. 32 William Chapman, “Why the Arctic is Climate Change’s Canary in the Coal Mine,” TedEd, 22 January 2015, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrEM3LHvjI0. Chapman reminds us that the Arctic is “actually a complex and finely balanced natural system,” rather than a “desolate environment where nothing changes.” As the reminder is issued, an animation of the Northern polar latitudes swirls with an image of a yin yang. Its extreme location, the video continues, “makes it vulnerable to feedback processes that can magnify even tiny changes in the atmosphere. In fact, scientists often describe the Arctic as ‘the canary in the coal mine’ when it comes to predicting the impact from climate change.” What happens in the Arctic, the video concludes, doesn’t always stay in the Arctic—and as this prophetic claim ends, an animation of a monkey in a tree eating a banana is finally swept away by a tide of water. See also Theresa Lou, “Canary in the Coal Mine: The Arctic as a National Imperative,” Council on Foreign Relations, 24 March 2017, accessed at: https://www.cfr.org/blog/canary-coal-mine-arctic-national-imperative. 33 My argument does not turn on an anthropological or descriptive rendering of Inuit or Indigneous contra-time, temporality, or future—colonial, clock, calendrical, scheduled, measured, linear. This is not a case study about the capitalist shifts in the temporal per Weber (1927), Thompson (1967), Bourdieu (1979), Koselleck (2004), or Fisher (2009). But there is extremely important work on Indigenous temporalities as a challenge to the Western, modern, and (neo) colonial framing. Though I don’t seek these times, now, in this future, they are vital interjections. See for example Randall A. Lake, “Between Myth and History: Enacting Time in Native American Protest Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 2 (1991), 126–30. See also Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012): 149-180; Lisa Stevenson, “Why Two Clocks?” in Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014): 129-148. 34 Muckelbauer, Future, 150. He also called it “turning away,” which will have been necessary to see a future emerging the end of the Arctic.

it “indirection.”35 This essay follows these insights, in turning away: first, following a

“misinterpretation” of Inuit sovereignty, I will draw together rhythmicity and sovereignty as they convene outside rhetorical immanence; then, I will perform a mis/reading of a

Greenpeace Canada campaign in support of the hamlet of Clyde River, Nunavut’s

Supreme Court case seeking to halt a proposed seismic survey in the waters of Baffin Bay and Davis Strait from 2016 to 2017. The seismic survey never happened. The Supreme

Court case, metonymically titled Clyde River,36 was won. By all accounts the outcome, of the trial and the campaign, was and is a success. I will argue that the campaign still “takes place,” as an Arctic rhetoric, and will continue so long as sovereignty is moved to the future.

The Future of the Arctic…

If I’ve said that the end of the Arctic is a contest of sovereignties in the future, it might be useful to recall, with Muckelbauer, that the future doesn’t always take place after the past.

For Muckelbauer the “problem of change” is perhaps (still) the unanswered challenge of postmodernism. At bottom, the challenge is not only a questioning of the binary. Binaries are not necessarily problems, no more than they are disposable or dissolved in some pure difference. Rather, what is at issue in the binary is the way in which those binaries have come to be defined as binaries in their instance—not the binaries “themselves,” but rather the processes by which oppositions are made and kept. This is not only meant to promote or privilege different content—the same or the different—but rather how we come to them. Muckelbauer: “what is at stake is the possibility of inventing a style of

35 Barbara A. Biesecker, “From General History to Philosophy: Black Lives Matter, Late Neoliberal Molecular Biopolitics, and Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017), 414. 36 Clyde River (Hamlet) v. Petroleum Geo-Services Inc., 2017 SCC 40, [2017] 1 S.C.R. 1069

engagement,” how problems are responded to, “that is irreducible to the dialectical movement of negation,”37 dis/affirming the same or the different, or synthesizing them into the and. In this reading, the future is not merely the difference to the past’s same, and therefore does not take place only after, sequentially.

But this dialectical movement of negation is always beholden to the

“appropriative dynamics enabled by the logic of identity.”38 In other words, this movement of identity and negation “cannot avoid being repeated.”39 “Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection,” wrote Deleuze, and “we produce something new only on the condition that we repeat … what is produced, the absolutely new itself, is in turn nothing but repetition”40 In Muckelbauer’s terms, then, the future splits: this “other” future is an “immanent, enabling force within an identified collective,” a movement, an “inclination,” or an “orientation toward emergence itself.”41 I will return to this enabling, immanent structuring of the future in rhythm, where it will (re-) encounter the terms of sovereignty.

For Edward Struzik, changes to the Arctic, “already occurring,” are the “signs of what’s to come in other parts of the world.”42 Struzik is ready to conclude that the decision of the future of the Arctic should be given over to the “scientific community.”43

This community must be entrusted with the capacity, he writes, to “answer all the questions about the future of the Arctic.”44 And certainly this same narrative has played

37 Muckelbauer, Future, 5. 38 Ibid, 32. 39 Ibid, 33. 40 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 90. 41 Muckelbauer, Future, 165. 42 Struzik, Future Arctic, 4. 43 Ibid, 202. 44 Ibid.

out in various branches of the judiciary45 in cases like Clyde River’s.46 Perhaps there is no doubt that decisions still reside in an old sovereign way, in the hands of policy-makers, governments, and “stakeholders,” but Struzik would have the real answer, the orienting trajectory, issue from those who collect and define the data. Only the data has the sovereign power to “urge” the momentum of doxa, to move “us,” to tell “the world what is happening in the Arctic and why the public should care.”47 Or in the words of Kim

Holémen, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, to define the debate about the ideal

“state of nature” for the Arctic’s future. The Arctic, then, is bestowed with the tools and language to move “what’s left of the world” properly toward the future, to decide, sovereignly, what “the rest of the world—scientists, environmentalists, aboriginal leaders, and the like” should do about it.48 All they lack, for Struzik, is what the scientific community begs to offer.

What is given over by the future- of this future-Arctic is not what comes for the

Arctic tomorrow, but the spacetime moving the Arctic. At the “end of the world,” spacetime—linking of the time of crisis to the approaches through which borders rise and fall—is a constitutive rhetorical “tissue,” to use Henri Lefebvre’s terminology—a tissue

“of” ecology, more-than-human lifetime, energy, quantity and mesure.49 It isn’t just about

45 Before Clyde River, Clyde River applied for a judicial review of the National Energy Board’s approval of a Geophysical Operations Authorization (“GOA”), granting permission for the seismic survey to proceed, in the Toronto Appellate Court in July 2014. In April 2015, Clyde River’s request was denied. In her decision, Justice Eleanor Dawson wrote that any scientific uncertainties about the project would be “ameliorated” by the “forward-looking conditions … allowing future input as scientific knowledge may be acquired and as any impacts of the Project are observed.” See Hamlet of Clyde River v. TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company ASA (TGS), FCA 179 (2015), [82]. 46 As the Supreme Court of Canada put it: “ The consultation process here was, in view of the Inuit’s established treaty rights and the risk posed by the proposed testing to those rights, significantly flawed. Had the appellants had the resources to submit their own scientific evidence, and the opportunity to test the evidence of the proponents, the result of the environmental assessment could have been very different.” Clyde River, [52]. 47 Struzik, Future, 203. 48 Qtd. in Struzik, Future Arctic, 203. 49 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 31. This “tissue” means that motions, momentums, interruptions, and schedules making up the operations of the world are, pace Lefebvre, of political concern before recognition (65). Rhythm can be controlled, imposed by producing a repetition, or

who the “we” is in the sentence “using scientific knowledge and traditional aboriginal knowledge to manage the end of the Arctic world as we know it”50—for we know who

“we” are—but rather it is the movement of the future, insofar as this sentence has purchase in a larger discourse of ends. But it’s clear that the ends and the means of this

“we” are at stake: such is the style of the future in advance. “What is the future of the

Arctic, which is so intimately tied to the future of more habitable places where we humans [there it is—and we will return to this] have settled in such great numbers?” asks

Struzik. The answer is there already. The future of the Arctic is given by this kind of question. And so, in advance: “The end of the Arctic that has existed for all modern time is upon us today.”51

Greenpeace variously employed this same language during its campaign with

Clyde River. In consultation rooms along the Baffin region, Inuit expressed to National

Energy Board and business representatives that the seismic survey threatened to deafen animals vital to the food system, something that some Inuit recalled from surveys in the

1980s. In the Clyde River consultation transcripts released by the National Energy Board,

Ilkoo Anqutikjuak spoke about fluctuations in shark activity after previous seismic surveys in the area while hunting turbot. He goes on to say: “I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Maybe there will be more sharks showing up. Maybe they will come

changed by introducing difference, but there are also no secrets to it (26). What was made abundantly clear in the response to the Baffin Bay seismic survey story was that Inuit put at risk the granting of state representatives and its partners to develop the Arctic, what might be called the rhythms of global capital or the “colonial matrix of power,” in Mignolo’s terms (Mignolo, Darker, 16). But to approach “the harmonies” of Inuit sovereignty, especially when that inhabitancy, occupancy, and knowledge confronts recognition, encounter, and address, is not a matter of rhythmic disruption (movement). What lingers in Baffin Bay, that is, isn’t a reconciliation of matters and materials, for there are no secrets for it, but rather what isn’t there to be found: the end of the future. 50 Struzik, Future Arctic, 6. 51 Ibid.

back. I don’t know … I’m telling the truth when I say things. And I’m not estimating or guessing. It’s what I know. What I’m telling you is the truth.”52

What the truth of this scene means is in question “at” the end of the world and in the end “of” the Arctic. Greenpeace’s media spectacle focused primarily on drawing attention, and drawing this scene into attendance, with the larger “human-generated” forces of climate change that I’ve drawn out here in part—the future of the Arctic. To this end (as it were), Greenpeace Canada’s “Save the Arctic” campaign site53 compels us to

“Imagine a world without the Arctic.”54 While “people” have lived “alongside some of the most elusive and majestic animals, and in some of the toughest conditions” on the planet, “now that is changing.” The appeal continues: “Without its cooling effect, much of our world would look and feel very different. In short our fate is tied to this frozen world.”55 In what follows, I will argue that the Greenpeace campaign is a turning toward

52 National Energy Board, “Public Review of the TGS NOPEC Geophysical ASA (TGS) Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) and Multi Klient Invest (MKI) Northeastern Canada 2D Seismic Survey Application,” Clyde River, 30 April 2013: 20. Though I don’t want to essentialize or impart a specific meaning of this appeal to the truth, I’m reminded of an interview with Inuit elder Saullu Nakasuk from Pangniqtuuq. The interview records her life story from her birth in Uummanarjuaq, her childhood, marriage, the birth of her twelve children, and all the knowledge she has attained. Interviewers ask her about what she was taught, and she responds that she was taught to sew and cut patterns, primarily with seal and caribou skin. “I can make a caribou parka in two days,” she says, and then: “I’m telling the truth when I say that. I only state what I can do. I only say what I can do” (Interviewing, 87). In the introduction to the series, the editors write that Inuit elders “had no wish to speak about things of which they had no personal experience” (5), because traditional knowledge is not abstract, but rather is produced in exchange and practice (10). As Keavy Martin has usefully demonstrated of qaujisimanngitannik (“what I haven’t experienced”), this is a form of knowledge the “speaker knows from personal experience, as opposed to the kind of ‘knowledge’ attained at the university … from second hand sources” (Stories, 108). See Saullu Nakasuk et al., Interviewing Inuit Elders: Introduction, edited by Jarich Oosten and Frédéric Laugrand (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 1999); Keavy Martin, Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012). 53 The campaign didn’t begin with Clyde River, but rather in 2012 as a way to oppose Arctic drilling projects primarily in the United States and Russia. Famously, what became known as the “Arctic 30” were apprehended in the Pechora Sea and held in Russia for nearly two months in September 2013 on charges of piracy for attempting to disrupt drilling operations by the Gazprom Prirazlomnaya drilling platform. The Greenpeace icebreaker, called the “Arctic Sunrise,” was only released from Russia in June 2014. See The Arctic Sunrise Case, Netherlands v Russian Federation, Provisional Measures, ITLOS Case No 22, ICGJ 455 (ITLOS 2013), 22nd November 2013, International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea [ITLOS] 54 Save the Arctic | YOUR actions make a difference. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.peoplevsoil.org/en/savethearctic/ 55 Ibid.

futurity as the end of the Arctic, repeating in a rhetoricity moving sovereignty into this future. To do so means a turn to rhythmicity.

Rhythm “in” the Rhetoric “of” Sovereignty

What kind of word is sovereignty for rhetoric? This question is already exceeded by the answers, and that there has been a lot to say on this question goes without saying. But this

“going without saying” is part of the way material rhetorics, ecological rhetorics, and rhetorics at the end of the world have inflected questions like these. If our contemporary understanding of rhetoric means sovereignty is “interrupted,” “disrupted,” by the unseating in the worldly, then maybe sovereignty is, after all, the wrong place (time) to begin. To ask what kind of word something “is” is a certain kind of demand, before-the- end “of” the lexicon, the discourse, the symbol, of polis, of history, of the subject, and of

“the rhetorical text.” But maybe this also suggests that asking what kind of word sovereignty is asks what sovereignty moves through, rhetorically.56

Derrida, reading Aristotle’s Politics, calls the ontological definition of sovereignty living well (eu zēn) in self-sufficiency (autarkeia), in “independence … the fact of commanding oneself, to have its own arkhē,” which is to say to have the “commencement and the commandment”57 within itself. The sovereign, then, is the “one who has his end in himself or is the end of everything.”58 This is the “fundamental canonical text” from

56 There have, on this account, been different theories tracing the “movement,” even the displacement of sovereignty— from Kantorowicz’s symbolic divine two bodies of the king, the material-semiotic-capital flesh of Santner’s psychoanalytically inflected popular sovereignty, the matter, orthodox and heterodox, of capital in Balibar, or the theologico-juridical unsaid of the bête in Derrida. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, translated by James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 57 Derrida, Beast Vol. 1, 344. 58 Ibid, 346.

which all the disagreements and translations of sovereignty “begin,” from the cut to the rhetor to the exception to the nation-state to capital. But when Derrida comes to answer— rather, to “remark”—on the translation of the word bête on which he trailed the question of the sovereign in his lectures La bête et le souverain, he says: “at bottom everything we have spoken about came down to problems of translation.” From the response and response-ability of the making distinction between Man and other, to the phallos of force that is “the very problem of sovereignty,”59 of what goes itself automatically as an automatic reflex,60 is the “translating interpretation” that traces “a limit between”—no matter the limit, really.61 With bête, Derrida finds that there is no word for it in other languages. On the one hand, bête stands alone, sovereignly untranslatable; on the other hand, bête precisely names, precisely translates a very French “context,” “connotation,”62 and life or experience as a practice. So bête is and is not animal or beast, whether as the limit or the movement, lost in its mis-translations as (is) the sovereign.

Sovereignty is a historically delimited concept, but delimitation—as definition, as proposition, or Idea, as Deleuze argued—is already movement.63 The movement of

59 Ibid, 206-7. 60 Ibid, 221. 61 Ibid, 336. 62 A cognate, though I will only be travelling implicitly with it, is Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s Walten in The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 2. In the context of Derrida’s lectures on sovereignty, Heidegger’s Walten occupies a particular mode of enablement broadly useful to rhythm. Derrida describes Heidegger’s Walten as the “dominant, governing power, as self-formed sovereignty, as autonomous, autarchic force, commanding and forming itself, of the totality of beings, beings in their entirety, everything that is” (Vol. 2, 39). Walten exceeds and precedes, without coming first, the theologico-political (41) of sovereignty—which Derrida rightly observes that as a “reigning,” as an “exception,” as a divine body, or as a decision, sovereignty is already an absurd excess (273)—and so Derrida reads it as an ultra-sovereignty in Heidegger’s thought, whether to ground metaphysics or to speak “the nothing” (283-4). In Walten is the coming, the arrival, the imposing-of, the prevailing of “the difference of the differents, the difference in the same and even as the same” (252) that answers already as “is” to nothingness, but is itself (as is-not) also what enables already saturated by “connotations” and potential-uses that risk in language and in spirit the violence of the sovereign (279-281) to what it is-not. Walten is to sovereignty that which is not an event or some other type of being or differencing, or an “is” itself, but is rather the enablement of the “is” which is still, stilled, (in) the violence of the sovereign. See The Beast and the Sovereign Volume 2, edited by Michel Lisse et al., translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). 63 Deleuze, Difference, 35-6.

delimitation is the condition upon which the sovereign—whether as exception or singularity to rhetoric—(re) constitutes the claim. Whether normative claims to law, to jurisdiction, to war, or to citizenship, membership, community, and so on, there moves that which overcomes the powers of delimitation even in its immanence. The movement of the delimitation has already defined the sovereign claim, and the time of that sovereign claim anticipates that movement of delimitation. To call this difference, therefore,

“exposes us” to the “danger” of the sovereign without the openness of its promise. In a roundabout way, immanence promises the sovereign in perpetuity, but not here or there.

The “arche-originary yes” is undifferentiated from this sovereign formulation, as the sovereign as such: firstly second, coming after. The presumed sovereign, presumed, and so absented. As an opening to the other and a cut from the other, both, is a rhetoricity— ecological or ambient or prelusive—which makes the sovereign unconditionally necessary and inseparable in the marks of the return, but only in the future that moves.

In an essay for Nilliajut,64 a collection of essays written by Inuit remarking on the terms of “sovereignty,” “patriotism,” and “security,” Rachel A. Qitsualik-Tinsley argued that the Inuit invention for the word “sovereignty” in Inuktut did not properly define what

Inuit sovereignty would or could mean.65 As has often been the case, she argued, Inuit have in the encounter with qallunaat66 been forced to invent what she calls “chimeric, make-do”67 words to suit conceptual forms that otherwise did not exist in the language.

For the word “sovereignty,” what she calls the “pretend-sovereignty word,”68 Qitsualik-

64 Nilliajut: Inuit Perspectives on Security, Patriotism, and Sovereignty (Ottawa: Inuit Tapariit Kanatami, 2013). 65 Rachel A. Qitsualik, “Innumarik: Self-Sovereignty in Classic Inuit Thought,” in Nilliajut: Inuit Perspectives on Security, Patriotism, and Sovereignty (Ottawa: Inuit Tapariit Kanatami, 2013), 23-34. 66 White people. 67 Qitsualik, “Innumarik,” 26. 68 Ibid.

Tinsley finds in Public Works and Government Services Canada’s “Archived Land

Claims Glossary - English-Inuktitut-French Glossary” the term aulatsigunnarniq aulatsigunnarniq. She doesn’t find in this word the “status of a supreme ruler, queen or king,” any more than she finds “complete authority and independence,” or “the sovereignty of nations … reduced by treaties, international agreements and the effects of world trade.” All she finds is the chimeric, the mistranslation, and what cannot properly define Inuit sovereignty. She writes: “Firstly, the root of the word is aulajuq: In the finest tradition of the quite action-oriented Inuktitut language, ‘that which moves.’ The modified aulatsi is ‘making things move.’ The latter half of our pretend-sovereignty word is gunnarniq, literally ‘ability to do so.’ As a whole, then, aulatsigunnarniq aulatsigunnarniq actually means ‘the ability to make things move.’”69 The perceptive rhetorician might feel a moment of recognition with this definition. As Hawhee argued, the “curious syncretism” of ancient rhetoricians, whose link between the movements of the body and rhetoric, runs all through the history of rhetoric as a kind of phusiopoietic agōn.70 In phusiopoietic agōn we reckon, perhaps, with part of the rhetorical history of the creative force of the gathering, the enabling of the granting (in spacetime), the rhythm that names in (mis-) translation, “the ability to make things move.”

But Lefebvre seems to respond here: the “previsionary” and “(future)” rhythmanalyst is they who will come to “give an account of [the] relation between the present and presence,” perceiving “the thing in the proximity of the present, an instance

69 Ibid, emphasis mine. The “pretending,” or imitation, will return. 70 Phusiopoiesis is how Hawhee describes, following Democritus, the Presocratic “creation of a person’s nature” (Bodily: 93), which links phusis, “a kind of capacity for change,” to poieō, “commonly known to ‘make or do,’ ‘produce,’ or ‘create,’ and [is] often used in the context of particular technai such as carpentry, medicine, and writing or speaking” (ibid). In other words, phusiopoiesis is an emergent force and “occurrence” in a “tangle of dynamics and forces” (Bodily: 108)—a rhythmic making, ability, becoming of the bodily-rhetorical “in the thick of things” (cite). This “make or do” force is linked with agōn, what Hawhee reminds is a gathering space—of contest, demonstration, encounter, and indeed the rhetorical force of “make or do.” See Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Ethics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

of the present but not presence,” into a “dramatic becoming.”71 Lefebvre has found favour in some branches of rhetorical study, especially where time meets place.72 This dramatic becoming is a worldly integration of the discursive and non-discursive—this wall, this table, these trees73—of the human and “more-than-human,” not dissimilar to what Bridie

McGreavy has called ecological rhetoric, or what Danielle Endres might call a “material- discursive phenomenon,” following Natasha Seegert’s definition of rhetoric as an interacting and relational force of signals in the world.74 There is a sharing of this dramatic becoming character of inherent ambiguity: in rhythm,75 imitation,76 kairos,77 and sovereignty.78 “Magic? Yes and no.”79

Are these, after all, philological ambiguities? Is it a problem of the “concept,” the

“term,” the representation?80 “Yes, yes, yes, ambiguities are,” replies Vitanza, “YES = ambiguities.”81 Derrick McCormack concurs.82 Even concepts, he writes, modify the

71 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 33. 72 Both McGreavy (2018) and Nicole Allen (2018) have employed French cultural theorist Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis within this expanded framework of rhetoric’s recent space-time unification. 73 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 33. 74 Danielle Endres, “The Most Nuclear-Bombed Place: Ecological Implications of the US Nuclear Testing Program,” in Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, edited by Bridie McGreavy et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 256. 75 Rhythm is marked, or rather characterized, “it seems,” writes Paola Crespi, by “an inherent ambiguity.” Paola Crespi, “Rhythmanalysis in Gymnastics and Dance: Rudolph Bode and Rudolph Laban,” Body and Society 20, no. 3 (2014), 31. 76 Imitation, the repetition of the same, or the “absolute repetition” in Lefebvre’s words (Rhythmanalysis 17), “seems to have had a rather difficult time representing itself.” Muckelbauer, Future, 55. 77 Kairos, writes Rickert, encounters a “growing body of work [that] has yet to dispel a particular difficulty with the concept. A theoretical vector at odds with any emphasis on rational or technological planning, kairos resists formalization and mastery,” Rickert, Ambient, 74. See also William H. Race “The Word Kairos in the Greek Drama” Transactions of the American Philological Association 111 (1981): 197. 78 “Much confusion about the dating of sovereignty has resulted from the inherent ambiguities of this concept,” writes Jens Bartelson in “Dating Sovereignty,” in “Forum: In the Beginning, There Was No Word (For It): Terms, Concepts, and Early Sovereignty,” edited by Julia Costa Lopez et al. in International Studies Review 0 (2018): 25. 79 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 33. 80 As Bergson might have argued, to rest “elaborated, thinned down, refined” and so “converted” (Creative Mind 156). Bergson’s famous example of the infinitely small elastic contracted to the point, the plot, now pulled out: do we focus on the line, or, as Bergson wanted, the “action which traces it,” its “pure” mobility” (193)? If we surrender to the line, to the concept that is the enclosure of representation (197), then what he called its undivided multiplicity, its duration, is lost because there is no arrival. See Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946). 81 Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: University of New York Press, 1997), 19.

94 rhythms of what he calls “ecologies of thinking,”83 or otherwise named spacetime. When

McCormack uses the word spacetime, he means “the qualities of felt gatherings,” of what he calls “sometimes fleeting … affects, percepts, and concepts.”84 His wagers are that bodies participate in, as much as they are affected by, the places of their being, in a relational, processual, and nonrepresentational way. But because there is a tradition of pathologizing the arrhythmia of rhythm, as in with harmony or aesthetic critique, these

“fleeting” spacetimes are always affirmed “at the most fragile orderings emerging from, and potentially returning to, chaos.”85 For Vitanza, rhetoric’s gambit is to denigrate the negative, to include the excluded “now reincluded, put back into the History of

Rhetoric”86—the big re-inclusion, the now-fully-included of the cast out.

If the scholar of International Relations can say that sovereignty is a social concept—a “cluster of practices, which in their speciﬁc constellation constitute an identiﬁable phenomenon”—and social concepts have ambiguity not as an effect “but an intrinsic attribute,”87 this is perhaps still dissimilar to Vitanza’s immanent ambiguity of the yes, what is to-be-return of the infinite re-inclusion. Yet there is a shadow of a metaphor, an implication (is it a hint?), maybe a familiarity or even a conspiracy of the sovereign in this ambiguity alongside the clusters of that ambiguity.

Rhetoric, rhythm, sovereignty: all appear—do they appear?—given in their ambiguity, resisting formalization (kairotically). So to the fourth-dimensionally plotted crossroads of

82 Derek P. McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 83 Ibid, 79. 84 Ibid, 4-5. 85 Ibid, 6. 86 Vitanza, Negation, 16. 87 Minda Holm, “Conclusion: What, When, and Where, Then, is the Concept of Sovereignty?” in “Forum: In the Beginning, There Was No Word (For It): Terms, Concepts, and Early Sovereignty,” edited by Julia Costa Lopez et al. in International Studies Review 0 (2018): 26-7.

rhetoric-rhythm-sovereignty, the question isn’t only where the given is going, or when, once when is whenced. Rather, rhythm and sovereignty share in their ways as preventions, and these preventative ways announce their rhetoric.

Consider how Elani Ikoniadu thinks of rhythmicity as a difference emerged together between the active and contingent, or in her words an amodal88 irregular temporal tension, which meets in the middle.89 Because Deleuze influences Ikoniadu, this middle might be usefully compared to Hawhee’s notion of kairos, which Muckelbauer and Rickert both remind as not in middle of anything per se. Rather, this middle or

“between” does not happen between identities, static referents, moments, because it is always moving, unstable and emergent, neither beginning nor ending with reason. Must not this middle, too, have been here—before?90 Rhythmicity, very much like these contemporary readings of kairos, is not apprehended. Though it is in some way retrospective, whether prelusively or amodally, and so Ikoniadu can argue that rhythm, like kairos, is a method more than a concept,91 one that acts like a passageway to

“ghostly” temporalities never fully experienced92—experienced only the way Paul Virilio described the negative horizon—or as a “summoning” of affective inter-actions between body, space, and time.93 Muckelbauer has argued for something similar.94 In attempting an answer to the problem of change, a problem that Ikoniadu also charges rhythm with the potential for solving, Muckelbauer performs what he called an affirmative style of

88 By this she means “modes and processes” that don’t rely on reason or sensory perception. In other words, rhythmicity is “of” time in the sense that it is what grants passage to those fields of temporality that emerge and even can be grasped, but only indistinctly, as a half-remembered dream of identity. Ikoniadu, Rhythm, 67. 89 Elani Ikoniadu, “A Rhythmic Time for the Digital,” The Senses and Society 7, no. 3 (2012), 263. 90 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 179. 91 Elani Ikoniadu, Rhythm and Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014), 7. 92 Ikoniadu, “Rhythmic Time,” 264. 93 Ikoniadu, Rhythm, 71. 94 “Yes, one must inhabit the repetitious movement of the dialectic,” wrote Muckelbauer, “but there are different ways of inhabiting it, different kinds of immersion.” Muckelbauer, Future, 43.

invention, “of writing as the encounter with singular rhythms,”95 following Deleuze and

Guattari’s well-trod invocation to ask what something can do. Singular rhythms of invention are intensive, immanent to particular inhabitances and encounters, but they are also non apprehensive, either in recognition or tangibility. But keeping in mind that rhythm is given in its non-apprehensive movement, their “situation” is such that—as

Muckelbauer points out—identity is not an opposition any more than is signification. If rhythmicity is a summoning for Ikoniadu, it is a “secretion” for Muckelbauer that only comes “through identity and negation.” Rhythm (such as it is) is what grants Muckelbauer a practice that demonstrates neither signification nor asignification properly defines rhetoric. While rhythmicity is a transdisciplinary theorization of spacetime, there seems to be a common intensive inhabitance, the singularity of encounter, as Muckelbauer has it, of the dialectic of negation, which is to say: movement. This is in some sense the rhetorical response to Lefebvre’s claim that to perceive rhythm one must already have been rhythmed. So: rhythms are secreted rather than secret. But there is a secret to rhythmicity, and it’s revealed in secretion.

A rhythmic secretion is inside both inside and outside, the move that grants the outside to intensivity.96 For rhetoricity at the end of the world, movement is in this sense vital to the future. Take for example the introduction Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life, wherein the editors write that rhetoric shares with movements97 in becoming networked,

95 Muckelbauer, Future, 44. 96 As Derrida put it, in-habitation (he means of the movement of différance, which is a movement contra sovereignty) is the only option—“because one always inhabits and all the more when one does not expect it”—for this movement doesn’t efface except by “falling prey to its own work” (Grammatology, 24). The future must then break away through inhabitance the breaking “absolutely with constituted normality,” the “proclaimed, presented” sort of “monstrosity,” to be “of” the “for that within it which will have put into question” (Grammatology, 5, emphasis mine). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998). 97 Meaning social movements, called “movements for change,” which are themselves becoming “more ecological.” Justine Wells et al., “Introduction,” in Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, edited by Bridie McGreavy et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 3.

97 hybrid, material, immersive, and “consequently dynamic.”98 This ecological rhetorical rhythmicity, an ongoing turning participating in, but no doubt different than the vibrant matters of new materialism, reckons with matter as an unsettled and non-discreet “lively” process.99 What makes Lefebvre’s work insightful and increasingly contemporary for this rhetoricity, which features in both McGreavy and J.M Ackerman’s essays,100 is the concern with the “ecological” (or is it “tissued”?) interplay upon “the time of living.”101

As McGreavy reads it, rhythm is an ecological “attunement to myriad presences.”102 So given the larger context of climate change and the Anthropocene, McGreavy is after a

“poetic approach to memory and responsiveness to environmental change,” which she finds in (ecological) rhythm.103 In her fieldwork with clammers in Frenchman Bay,

McGreavy argues that “biological metaphors,” like cycles, trace “organic rhythms in ways that articulate bodies and ecologies in the present.”104 We live, after all, in troubled times—troubled times, an echo of Harraway, but also a more secret echo. The Arctic figures several times in this account of the American clammers in the place of Frenchman

Bay, who live in the cyclical-metaphorical-poetic lifetime of the socioecology, as a secret.

We might say this kind of life is, following Lefebvre, rhythmed by rhythm and, being rhythmed, is secreted in the movements of being-rhythm. This is not merely tautology in

98 Ibid. They continue, “In seeking entryways for reckoning with today’s myriad crises, environmental communication scholars have valued the ecological perspectives of scientists, indigenous elders, activists, and many others.” 99 Ibid, 6. The introduction also maps, or traces, a kind of history or tendency of rhetoric open to, and then to (increasingly) open to ecological thinking, from the pre-Socratics to Kenneth Burke’s “ecological tendencies” (8), to Robert McGee process oriented material rhetoric (ibid), and of course Barbara A. Biesecker’s influential “interjection,” as Diane Davis once put it, to the supposed rhetor “of” rhetorical situation, as Bitzer and Vatz had it. 100 See John M. Ackerman, “Walking in the City: The Arrival of the Rhetorical Subject,” in Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, edited by Bridie McGreavy et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 117-140. 101 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 51. 102 Bridie McGreavy, “Intertidal Poetry: Making Our Way Through Change,” in Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, edited by Bridie McGreavy et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 109. This also echoes Rickert. 103 McGreavy, “Intertidal,” 88. 104 Ibid, 90.

98 Lefebvre’s reading of rhythm, for to understand and perceive rhythm, to even have metaphors of it, we must first have been rhythmed by rhythm. We must, therefore, have come—we always have in (“of”) advance—into the pulse, or “the garland,” of the rhythmic. But for Lefebvre, we must also get outside of it—we must be both inside and outside of rhythm. Though contemporary rhetoric seems now to have rediscovered this

Baudrillardian rhythm through Lefebvre, we perhaps re-encounter an “arrhythmia” when confronting this inside-outside positionality of Lefebvre’s thinking. Various authors who have attempted to seize hold of Lefebvre’s quasi methodology have attempted to rewrite or adapt it, partially in response to its quite heuristic and vague design, what might be called its unwillingness to invite an empirical clarity about its empirical goals.105

Especially elusive, perhaps, are two moments. First in his 1986 essay with Catherine

Régulier, ‘Essai de rythmanalyse des villes méditerranéennes’: “When rhythms are lived, they cannot be analysed. … We do not grasp even a single one of them separately, except when we are suffering. In order to analyse a rhythm, one must get outside it. Externality is necessary; and yet in order to grasp a rhythm one must have been grasped by it, have given or abandoned oneself ‘inwardly’ to the time that it rhythmed.”106 Second, early in

Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis: “In order to grasp and analyse rhythms, it is necessary to get outside them, but not completely […] to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its duration.

… In order to grasp this fleeting object, which is not exactly an object, it is therefore necessary to situate oneself simultaneously inside and outside.”107

105 See for example (Amin and Thrift 2002; Elden 2004; Simpson 2008; Borch et al. 2015) 106 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 95. 107 Ibid, 37.

99 This equation is likely familiar to those who recall Carl Schmitt’s Political

Theology, or Giorgio Agamben’s reading in Homo Sacer.108 As Schmitt famously argued with the “borderline concept” of the exception,109 the sovereign “stands outside the normally valid legal system, [but] nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to be suspended in its entirety.”110 As with the exception that cannot be anticipated and therefore codified111—for this would invite inside what is outside and undo the sovereign—the rhythmanalyst “does not have the right to provoke” the “distinct existence” of individual rhythms,112 but rather must come upon them and be found within them. So it should not be surprising that the “(future)” rhythmanalyst will be one who recognizes113 both of the inside and outside simultaneously, as Schmitt’s sovereign decides the unanticipated.114 I draw this out not to condemn rhythm to the sovereign, but rather to “trace” the connotative relation of the body and the sovereign in rhythmicity, which is for Lefebvre always a garland, a tangle, a tissue.

108 This is what Agamben calls the “paradox” of sovereignty, which figures as the original Abandonment, which is to say the “originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it.” The abandonment is linked to an Aristotelian dynamis, a potentiality that need not pass into actuality—it is, therefore, as abandonment, a movement that emerges, secretes. Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 28-29. 109 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 110 Ibid, 7. 111 Ibid, 6. 112 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 31. 113 Ibid, 32. 114 The inside and outside (non-) distinction here is different, I would argue, than two related movement-theoretical distinctions. On the one hand, Zygmunt Bauman’s claim that fluidic power is “everywhere and nowhere,” and on the other, Thomas Nail’s ontology of motion used to critique Étienne Balibar’s “extensive” border—when everything is a border, nothing a border. For Nail’s ontology, the border is (in) motion rather than an extensive quality of the world. The difference between these two arguments, which suppose a way of flowing, to Lefebvre’s rhythmanalytical “experience,” resides in the necessity of having-been-both to have enabled, retrospectively and prospectively, the fact of rhythmicity. While Bauman and Nail are critiquing a “way” of flowing, Lefebvre is arguing for the conditions necessary to have recognized that way in the first place. See Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones et al. (London: Verso, 2002); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2012); Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

100 In ecological rhetoric,115 the turn to biological metaphors, as McGreavy writes,

“the ways of relating to the world shaped by these rhythms that are necessary and available to sustain organic and rhythmic patterns,”116 also then acts as the translation that moves, connotatively, with the futures of those bodies as a world or a gathering of beings sharing in poiesis, the being of time and space thought together in memory, in grief, or in poetry. If rhythm is the enablement of granting—an invitation, a “creation,” an availability, an opening, a break, a relating, a secret-ion—then the enablement and the granting are both connotative in their movements. Returning, then, briefly to Frenchman

Bay and the clammers that McGreavy worked with and alongside, and the place of the

Arctic in the story told by clammers. There where the water meets the land, where, eventually and eventally, clamming becomes “dead,”117 the Arctic’s end grants the biological metaphor that reaches into the rhythmic space where grief in “troubled times” begins.118 McGreavy argues that these intertidal “metaphors guide us to remember in complex, unexpected, and potentially transformative ways.”119 Throughout the different essays composing the compendium of ecological rhetorics, the Arctic figures only as

115 Always a rhetoric “at” the end of the world. 116 McGreavy, “Intertidal,” 93. 117 McGreavy recalls: “This plankton [a previously unknown phytoplankton to the Gulf of Maine] produces a biotoxin known as domoic acid that causes amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP), so named because people who eat clams that have eaten the plankton can experience permanent memory loss. I mark the trope of irony, turning this turn, folding forgetting back on itself. I asked him how he was doing. He paused, turned to look at me, and quietly said: “Clamming’s dead.” Staying with this kind of trouble means living with the hollowness carved out by presence made absent,” McGreavy, “Intertidal,” 110, emphasis mine. 118 McGreavy relays the clammers’ sense of “dire consequences” through climate-related change to the local ecosystems of Frenchman Bay, where Native Americans “used to be” before colonization. Matt, one of the clammers she interviews, evokes the melting Arctic and Antarctic ice in several different instances. This melt is “in” a “biological metaphor” that McGreavy argues are “apparatuses between body and world, movements, and phenomena that attune us to rhythm, difference, and patterns” (105). “Let’s say if the northern hemisphere,” Matt worries, “if all the ice melts, you’ve got 20–30 feet of sea rise, and if the Antarctic melts, you’ve got 200 feet. So at 20, 30 feet, that’s like half the world’s population lives here, if not more.” For McGreavy, the “virtual story” he tells gives way to the poetry of the “ecological attributions of this dynamic shaping” (104). As I have been arguing, this “virtual sense” is the secret(ion) of this ecological rhythm, the future where sovereignties are in contest as the end of the Arctic. 119 Ibid, 96.

101 reference to other essays, or part of the “ways” of these biological metaphors of remembering and living-with, which hinges on what is precisely not secreted by “us.”

The end of the Arctic is what, in part, enables the granting of access to these rhythms of biological metaphors in memory, grief, and sharing. McGreavy writes:

“Biological metaphors turn our attention to ecology as ontology and ethic and, when paired with poetics, can guide how we make the world so attuned.”120 These are valuable ways of the rhetorical unification of space and time, and indeed Indigenous scholarship has variously affirmed these insights. Yet this “turning,” this pairing, this guiding, this langue that is the “metronome through which rhythm connects experience with pattern and expression”121 is also indissociable from the tropic sphere of immunological life-time.

As the Arctic connects here, virtually and rhythmically, to the material-discursivity of the metaphor—as memory and Anthropocenic grief—it also recirculates the life-time back into the Arctic, back into the rhythms Inuit live in photos of skinny polar bears,122 in the silence of consultation rooms, and in appeals to “save the Arctic.” The Arctic, even in this metaphorical re-turning to the ontology of material-discursivity, is the immunological outside of what lives, rhythmically. Our connection, our grief, our oikos, our “us,” “is” only insofar as the Arctic is in the bare repetition “of” the end.

So in some sense, the end of the Arctic is and is not a question of sovereignty tout court any more than it is the rhythm of (in) signification. Rhythm is not itself an object, is-not in “the world,” but also cannot be stilled by immanence, experience, or relationality. The positing of rhythmicity in the worldly ‘us’ gestures (gestes, acts) in

120 Ibid, 93. 121 Ibid. 122 See for example Tad Lemieux, “Editorial Introduction | Indigenous Matters: Cultures, Technologies, Mediations,” MediaTropes 7, no. 1 (2017), i-xx.

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absentia to the royal body, to the community, to the reader, to the arrangement, and to the audience: the ‘we’ that gathers. In the collective metaphorical grieving evoked by

McGreavy’s clammers is the enablement of the future. On the one hand, the “poetic approach to biological metaphor emphasizes how meaning and memories are made recursively and ecologically,”123 but this recursion is recursively anticipatory as a biological metaphor in the “time” of change. If rhythm is a “way” of rhetoric, then there are “outsides” of the ecology in the skin of insides. And how the outside is a constitutive enablement of rhythmicity is already in this skin. In the new materialist and ecological rhetorics, and the rhythmic theories they often work with, we find the “undamaged” and

“saturated immanence” of that spacetime enabling the immuno-political prevention “of” sovereignty.124 Without responding, for it is of a different future, Arctic rhetoric re-turns.

If there is a rhythmic method for this rhetoricity, it would be “of” misreading and mistranslation. Already the history of philosophy knows and repeats this terminology, the misreading.125 To both I turn away.

…The Future of Baffin Bay

“Writing about [Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit] is not easy.”126 This is because IQ is “more than a philosophy,”127 and it is precisely in this sense of exceeding philosophy that IQ

123 McGreavy, “Intertidal,” 101. 124 For more on the “saturation” and preventions of immanence, see Frédéric Neyrat, Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism, translated by Steven Shaviro (New York: Forham University Press, 2018), 17. 125 We might think of Deleuze’s letter that sardonically calls the history of philosophy precisely that. 126 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, sometimes translated to Inuit traditional knowledge, is better understood as “what Inuit have always known to be true.” It’s in this sense that we must recall qaujisimanngitannik in endnote 53, where the not- experienced is a condition of telling. The story is given in the telling only insofar as it speaks who tells it, and qaujisimanngitannik is the truth of the story as knowledge (experience). Writing about IQ is difficult, in this sense, because is non-apprehensive and always a translation—here it meets sovereignty, rhythmicity, rhetoricity. But as we will come to see, it has already met sovereignty in the future. IQ, even evoking it now, is this risk of secretion. And so it must be remembered, for it is an obligation of mistranslation and misreading: “IQ is not a list of rules, values and principles, or even simply a way of thinking … It is a way of thinking and doing based in beliefs, experience and

103 draws what follows into turning away, and to gesture back to the Inuit invention of what

Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley’s pretend-sovereignty word. The future of Baffin Bay is therefore in the approach of aulatsigunnarniq. And so: an evening in March 2013,128 there assembled a group of about twenty people in the community hall of Clyde River,

Nunavut. At a table facing the community sat a representative from Multi Klient Invest

AI,129 research scientists, and a representative from the Canadian energy regulator, the

National Energy Board (NEB). To the gathered, the NEB representative said he was there to offer “the opportunity to make comments” on a “proposed project.” This opportunity, the gathered were told, would “assist … in making a recommendation, either to approve the application with conditions that should be required to be followed or to deny it.”130

The proposed project was officially named the Northeastern Canada 2D Seismic Survey, a five-year seismic survey project that would have taken place in the waters of Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. Two years after the project met unanimous opposition from Inuit communities, these meetings would merely codify into law the myriad ways that the NEB and industry representatives failed in their duty to consult with Indigenous peoples.131

wisdom, and it is being challenged by goals and ways of thinking that are part of a very different Qallunaat culture” (19). These are not theoretical risks, they don’t live in hermeneutics or heuristics—“Children who have graduated from high school are still committing suicide” (ibid). Joe Karetak and Frank Tester, “Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Truth and Reconciliation,” in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known To Be True, edited by Joe Karetak et al., (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 1-19. 127 Ibid, 3. 128 This was two years after the May 2011 submission of the proposal to the National Energy Board. Communities along Baffin Bay had already, in 2011 consultations, unanimously opposed the project. However, because the proposed survey was outside of the borders of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, jurisdiction fell to the Canadian federal regulative agency, the National Energy Board. Consultations took place for the second time, including NEB representatives, Inuit representative organizations, hunting and fishing associations, local governments, elders, and community members between 29 April 2013 and 02 May 2013 in Iqaluit, Pond Inlet (Mittimatalik), Qikiqtarjuaq, and Clyde River (Kanngiqtugaapik). 129 A Norwegian engineering and construction firm representing tripartite energy and geophysical consortium seeking to pursue a five year seismic survey project in Nunavut, including: TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company (TGS) and Petroleum GeoServices (PGS). 130 NEB, Clyde River, 12. 131 Part of the reason was that it wasn’t the first attempt to initiate a seismic survey in the region. Less than a year prior to the submission of this project proposal, a similar seismic survey project in Lancaster Sound was struck down by the Nunavut Court of Appeals. But with this new proposed project, located only 12 nautical miles from Nunavut, just

104 The rejection that followed from communities along Baffin Bay to this proposed project, initiated by then-mayor Jerry Natanine from Clyde River, would codify their struggle in the emerging case law of the constitutional duty to consult with Indigenous peoples, and find Baffin Inuit allied with Greenpeace132 in a social media campaign that appealed to the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the right to food and FPIC,133 and the end of the Arctic. In this way, Clyde River’s struggle and their campaign with

Greenpeace echoes a “transboundary” issue that spans the planetary, and is unbounded by media reportage, Facebook posts, retweets, YouTube commentary, legislative documents, government spending, economic debates, activist claims, or geopolitical spats. For this boundary threatens us all—this is the name of Anthropocene, the future of the Earth plotted through the end of the Arctic. The Baffin Bay seismic survey proposal therefore never spoke of failure or success. If Inuit communities had to enunciate the existential

outside of the Nunavut Settlement Area (NSA), jurisdiction fell to the federal energy regulator and precluded the territorial government from legally challenging the project within the borders authorized by the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. 132 It is simply not possible to rehearse the story that links Greenpeace to Inuit. But one could trace it by merely staying with the influential and indispensible work of geographer George Wenzel, who has worked with Inuit in Clyde River since the 1970s. Greenpeace are perhaps best known for their campaign in the 1970s and 1980s against the harp seal hunt. Rather than rehearse the whole story, then, perhaps the first sentence of the 2014 Greenpeace apology to Inuit will say more: “A seal pup and a hunter — and a Greenpeace activist standing between them.” While the campaign had “good intentions,” to end the commercial seal hunt and the selling of ringed seal furs to the European market, which it succeeded in doing, the greatest financial harm was to the Inuit hunt. Already in 1978, Wenzel wrote: “While it is not yet possible to claim a direct causal link between the protests heard outside the North and the decline of the ringed-seal market, it is already evident that the uncompromising approach of the opponents of the Newfoundland-Gulf seal hunt is having an unsettling effect” (Wenzel 1978, 6).e T n years later, and from then on, Wenzel would help chart the catastrophic financial and social effects of the seal ban. See: George Wenzel, “The Harp-Seal Controversy and the Inuit Economy,” Arctic 31, no. 1 (1978), 3-6; “‘I Was Once Independent’: The Southern Seal Protest and Inuit,” Anthropologica 29, no. 2 (1987), 195-210; Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Joanna Kerr, “Greenpeace Apology to Inuit for Impacts of the Seal Campaign,” Greenpeace Canada, 24 June 2014, accessed at: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/5473/greenpeace-apology-to-inuit-for-impacts-of -seal-campaign/. 133 According to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, FPIC, or “free, prior, and informed consent,” is right specific to Indigenous people that allows for the withholding of consent to any project that may affect their territories—ranging from cultural and spiritual practices to food sources. See UN General Assembly, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: resolution / adopted by the General Assembly, 2 October 2007, A/RES/61/295, available at: https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf [accessed 10 April 2019].

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risk of the particular, this development project, and the hospitality134 for the general— development as such—their claims advanced upon the already plotted end “of” the

Arctic, resettled before the Court issued its “final word.”135

It is perhaps tempting to read the (rhetoric of the) future of Baffin Bay as always heavy with the potential for “internal decolonization,” as with how Jason Edward Lewis described a strategic appropriation of dominant rhetorics by Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples against the given-in-advance of Native removals in 19th century

America—the repurposing, enacting, a détournement,136 or an exposing “from within”137 that is in there for decolonization rhetorics.138 And there is perhaps no question that rhetoric, as it has come to be understood in the world, imposes a risk upon the claim I offer, threatening to return and resettle in an instance of Indigenous peoples moved- without-resistance, another being-toward-passing-over. The repetition of this passing over recurs, writ into the being-invented by colonial narratives of disappearance, extinction, elegy, silent apolitical existence, indeed in the very territories purported to have been

134 Echoes: Jerry Natanine was routinely quoted as saying “Inuit are not against development” (CBC 2017). And as the lawyer for Clyde River, Nader Hasan, was quoted as saying: “The Inuit did not close their door to these companies. They were extremely gracious hosts” (Nunatsiaq 2017). And in a 1972 issue of the magazine Inuit Monthly, Zebedee Nungak, from Nunavik, wrote: “We the Inuit are experiencing a time in which our land is being exploited and explored by various mining, oil, and ‘progress’ development companies. We are aware that development of various kinds is inevitable in our land at some time or other. We want to make it clear that we are not against any and all development. But this is our land and we will not be bypassed in planning, participation, and benefit of such development activities” (qtd. in Shadian, 91). See Jessica M. Shadian, The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty: Oil, Ice, and Inuit Governance (New York: Routledge, 2014); Jim Bell, “Clyde River Scores Big Win for Nunavut Inuit at the Supreme Court,” Nunatsiaq 26 July 2017, accessed at: https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674clyde_river_scores_big_win_for_nunavut_inuit_at_the_supreme_court/. 135 As the Supreme Court of Canada put it. See Elyse Skura, “‘We Thought No One Would Care’: Clyde River Inuit Flooded With Support,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, November 29 2016, accessed at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/supreme-court-indigenous-duty-to-consult-clyde-river-seismic-testing- 1.3873059. 136 Casey Ryan Kelly, “Détournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969– 1971),” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44 (2014): 168-190. 137 Ibid, 167. 138 Jason Edward Lewis, “Native Resistance Rhetoric and the Decolonization of American Indian Removal Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 1 (2009), 67.

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“discovered.”139 As rhetorical scholars have now often come to describe, rhetoric and risk cohabitate.140 To be sure, Inuit were not silent and non-instrumental, helpless or voiceless.

And in the course of approaching rhythmicity, there is no sense in which Indigenous resistance to (neo) colonial power was merely stilled, disrupted, interrupted, or arrhythmic by a dominant “other” rhythm.

But if the end of the Arctic enables a granting in advance of itself, an indirection where the future is a contest of sovereignties, indeed (in) a granting “of” immanence, then, in the words of Frédéric Neyrat, the end of the Arctic “prevents,”141 and this prevention shares in contest vulnerability, capacity, resilience.142 Rhetoricity, then, must also seek to advance a (mis-) reading of what it casts in, so that it does not settle (out) the end of the Arctic, moved in the rhetoricity of world and the futures of (in) habitability.

139 Or, as Edmundo O’Gorman argued, not discovered, but “invented.” Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry Into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). 140 Michael Bernard-Donals writes, for example, of mobility’s “material and discursive force”: “the real extent to which mobility, the potential to be otherwise, has as much potential to stand in the way of rhetorical understanding as it does to make new understandings possible,” and there “are instances of mobility that hint at the vulnerability and potential violence that can be produced by mobility’s material and discursive force.” See Bernard-Donals, “Rhetorical Movement, Vulnerability, and Higher Education,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 52, no. 1 (2019), 5. I am in implicit conversation in this essay with the violent displacements, whether of mobility or of “interrupting fields” of rhetorical violence described by Bernard-Donals. See also “Divine Cruelty and Rhetorical Violence,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014), 416. 141 Neyrat, Atopias, 7. 142 Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy, “Thinking Ecologically About Rhetoric’s Ontology,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 1 (2017), 1-25. Take, for example, what the authors write of resilience: “Resilient, vulnerable ecologies empower modes of rhetoric to act (necessarily an acting with). […] As for our example, if discourses of harvesters are to be sustained, then the tides must work them, too, and harvesters must cultivate their ability to be affected by the tides. This makes them—and so the rhetoric—adaptable” (19). Resilience is what “holds” “responsiveness, complexity, and adaptivity at its center,” allowing for these “resilient assemblages” to become rhetorical capable (18) as “ecologically emergent” (10). Following Elizabeth Grosz and Karen Barad, the authors argue for an ecology emerging rhetorical capacity that is a “creating swirl” of matter, such that water’s interaction with rocks and shells moves and makes a place for clam harvesters, to “conceive possible futures” for aquaculture, which then is acted upon by those there conceiving with everything that makes-futurities. How would rhetorical capacity be impacted by so-called invasive species? Imagine, for the example, the Baffin shoreline whose changes are wrought by industrial development below the 60th parallel. Inuit are often conceived in terms of their resilience. Indeed, resilience is a powerful term for Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit to describe Inuit culture and peoplehood. But resilience is also employed as branch of study in relation to the effects of climate change on Inuit ecologies—a kind of invasive species of rhetoric, no doubt, that Inuit are not full participants in. In this sense, these futures are those also conceived ecologically, elsewhere, ecologically, rhythmically.

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Save the Arctic

In 2015 Greenpeace Canada released video called “The Polar Traveler,”143 where actress

Rachel McAdams prosopopeially narrates the story of a polar bear walking through grass fields, skate parks, alleyways, and city streets. “I’ve never been much of a traveler,” says the polar bear. “Truth is, I’ll soon be homeless unless I find a new place to live.” The bear recounts that it is homeless not just because of global warming, but rather due to Shell’s exploratory drilling projects in the Chukchi Sea.144 This drilling means: “My habitat is doomed, and time is running out… unless someone can stop them.” The video ends with a whispered “Save the Arctic.” This final tag is a refrain, refrained as a plea and a name that takes place in the future. For the future of the polar bear is not given by the drilling in the Chukchi Sea as a proposition. Indeed, Shell would cease drilling in part because the well was non-profitable. But to what does this “unless” refer in the video? Unless someone can stop Shell, the habitat will remain doomed, or time will keep running out, or both? In the context of the story and the campaign, the bear wanders city streets because drilling makes the immanent doom of its habitat imminent, seeming to presence both

Greenpeace and the polar bear. Both are rhetorically linked by capitalist resource development and threats to habitability by climate change. Climate change is the implicit slow violence, as Rob Nixon would have said,145 of the video’s rhetorical appeal. But no matter what the future of drilling was in the Chukchi, the habitat is still always doomed.

Greenpeace’s refrain to “save the Arctic,” claimed and named, is not a refrain “of” the name or the plea. Rather, it refrains the future of habitability in the body of the city polar

143 “Greenpeace Presents: The Polar Traveler (ft. Rachel McAdams), GreenpeaceCanada YouTube, 1 July 2015, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ9-ozwgEPc. 144 Like the Baffin Bay seismic survey proposal, drilling in the Chukchi Sea remained strictly propositional—and yet, did it not take place in the future? 145 See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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bear. Yet this bear is not absented from the Arctic and presenced in the city, no more than the refrain gestures to a possible future-Arctic. No, for the polar bear already is of the city. The future of the polar bear is the refrain, but not of its life or ecology.

Economically, technologically, ecologically, the nation-state adapts through whatever it can assert its claim over the future. But these steady assertions are increasingly fragile, threatening to collapse under the moving narratives of place and community into which the markets that compete for the future of the Arctic as a development project and a “shared future” compete. This competition takes on global proportions and modalities in Canada, where the future of the Arctic isn’t just a projection of a territorial vision for the Canadian imaginary, but, in Foucault’s terms, an active

“conduct” of the institutional, economico-political, sociocultural and its “management of possibilities.”146 No less can this management be mistaken for a direct or agential intervention by a state power anymore. Such a brazen intervention would threaten the humanitarian performances of what Lisa Stevenson has called “anonymous” care147—the same care that exposes itself to the infinitude of life and the expectation of Inuit death from suicide or tuberculosis—exposing in retrospect the fiction of the “freedom” of the

“community” of rational finite actors it appeals to. Whether in duty-bound consultations or in activist campaigns, in Baffin Bay both required precisely the “exercises” of freedom, the fantasy of choice, and the imagination of consent to a standardized economy of the future moving along a timeline of progress (“save the Arctic,” in refrain).

Speculations about territorial incursions by Russia or the United States or the

Norwegians, the fever dreams of the Harper government’s renewed sovereignty claims at

146 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982), 777-795. 147 Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).

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the dawn of the 2007 financial crisis, today give way to the statistical forecasts of nature, to what resource capital means and signifies to a world of market downturns and “late” capitalism, to climate catastrophes and social detritus in wait, and the coming securitization promising to re-place “us” against a planetary upheaval on orders of magnitude barely yet imaginable. And so while, in the words of Nunavut Court Justice

Sue Cooper, no amount of money could compensate the loss of culture threatened by the potential harm of seismic surveys,148 the various encounters in Baffin Bay only seem to grant the ability to decide on the future. In these terms the metonymy, Clyde River truly does succeed in claiming this decision again, precisely because in the nation-state’s terms, finance and community don’t depart—capital and resource are the future.

So the story of the Baffin Bay seismic survey is one already told in the future perfect, whether as a proposition or a decision, as many extraction projects on Indigenous lands are.149 Greenpeace’s campaign urged the public to “defend the defenders.”150 As with the Polar Traveler, Inuit are moved throughout as a link to planetary connectivity: a media-ecological and caretaker Indigeneity coming to the plot of Arctic land in the futurity of Anthropocene habitability. To this end, the Greenpeace campaign prefigures

Clyde River as metonymic in advance: as Clyde River, as “defenders,” as “human beings,” as a “shared humanity” who cares for, is on the “front lines” of the crisis, and yet figure within the defense as a part already seeking, and finding, a whole (world)—a

148 Qikiqtani Inuit Association. v. Canada (Minister of Natural Resources), 2010 NUCJ 12, [48]. 149 Already before the NEB approved the project, and despite three years of unanimous opposition from all Baffin Bay communities, the consortium advertised jobs in Clyde River for liaison officers and observers as part of the project. A representative for the hiring firm told Nunatsiaq that the “early announcement of these job opportunities provides a sufficient time for people to get required training.” See Lisa Gregoire, “Firm Hiring for Nunavut Seismic Testing, But Project Not Yet Approved,” Nunatsiaq 5 March 2014, accessed at: https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674consortium_hiring_for_nunavut_seismic_testing_but_project_not_yet_appr/ 150 “To defend these courageous defenders in Clyde River we need supporters around the world to take action and use their international pressure to tell Trudeau that he must act on his words.” See “Join International Solidarity with Clyde River: Stop Seismic Blasting!” Greenpeace Greenwire, 16 November 2016, accessed at: https://greenwire.greenpeace.org/netherlands/en/events/join-international-solidarity-clyde-river-stop-seismic-blasting

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diversity of wholes, multiple wholes—for this is how Greenpeace makes reference to international law and human rights discourses of Indigenous rights and sovereignty—that is always in turn, predictably, to the Arctic. Predicting the apocalyptic future of the seismic survey, for “Clyde River,” and tying it to both climate change and capitalist accumulation of resources, allowed Greenpeace supporters to save Inuit from the future, resettled in advance through their inhabitance as protectorate of the future, beings whose ends are refrained through-out the Arctic. Mitigation, amelioration, resilience: these defenses all grant the moral ground of Arctic rhetoric. That future is counted on and in the emergency of life-itself, of rhetoricity all the way down, and defined by the ends of its living beings, not only in the discontinuity of elemental nature but in a closing off that needs Inuit bodies to save, unify, and remember more-than-human bodies: narwhal bodies, seal bodies, or bodies of water, and through that remembrance, a sur-vivance:

“our” saving, the saving of the Arctic as the immanent future.

But in this battle for the “soul” of Canada,151 the future is not a matter of tense.

The rhetoricity described here is rhythmicity, where the future is “of.” If the future of

“Canada’s Arctic” is in-distinguishable from capital and resource, the Greenpeace appeals to the end of the Arctic are of the future in the sense that it is in this future where sovereignties are in contest. Part of the Greenpeace campaign included a mixed-media campaign, developed “in coordination with Clyde River,” leading up to the Supreme

Court challenge on 30 November 2016. The “Stop Seismic Testing” Facebook page shared Greenpeace hashtags, but also various media articles and opinion pieces, selfies of

Inuit along the Baffin hunting, holding protest signs, and living on the land, and included

151 As Nader Hasan put it: "This case is really about the soul of Canada … Are we going to be a nation that takes Indigenous and Inuit rights seriously? Or are we going to allow Indigenous rights to be reduced to a due diligence checklist for industry proponents to check off?" Skura, “Clyde River,” CBC.

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stories of hunting, and the existential link of Inuit to food and traditional knowledge.

Indeed, Inuit from Clyde River, Pond Inlet, Rankin Inlet, and around the Baffin region shared stories and photograph this Facebook account. Sandra Inutiq from Iqaluit shared photographs of catching and butchering a seal, saying: “This is our world, how we can be here.”152

Inuit, of course, repeat that water and the animals that live in them are a “way of life,”153 and as Siila Watt-Cloutier offered: “Next time you see images of blood on the ice or waters of the Arctic, think ‘affirmation of life,’ not ‘confirmation of death’.”154 Rachel

Qitsualik-Tinsley once wrote of an encounter between ethnographer Knud Rasmussen and an Inuk. He asked them: “What do you want?” Qitsualik-Tinsley continues, “The

Inuk’s response was to run off a long list of things that he must avoid in order to stay healthy.”155 In the terms of IQ, these are maligarjuat (the big things that must be followed), which are established through inunnguiniq (the process of making a human being).156 “In an Inuit worldview,” where indeed all things are “integrated and intertwined,” what is most important about inunnguiniq is to maintain harmony and balance157 for future generations because Inuit ancestors knew the maligarjuat to be true.

152 “United Against Seismic Testing,” 6 October 2016, accessed at: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Unite-Against- Seismic-Testing-1391093554253151/posts/ 153 Ibid, 12 October 2016. 154 Ibid, 9 November 2016. 155 Rachel Qitsualik, “Nunani: Want (Part 2),” Nunatsiaq, 17 May 2003, accessed at: https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/nunani_want_part_two/. 156 “[Which] was carefully structured to assist children in developing strong adherence to these [maligarjuat], to the point where they became natural elements of the individual’s personality. One way of instilling these principles in a child is through the telling of stories, sometimes over and over. The same story has different versions and emphases from place to place and among those telling it,” which is suited to the experience, knowledge, necessary at the right time. Karetak and Tester, “Inuit,” 3-4. 157 As Rhoda Karetak said, harmony is related to aajiiqatigiingniq (working together to deal with threats to social harmony and balance), which is closely associated to inuutsiargniq (wellness),” which is to say that aajiiqatigiingniq “was intended as a process to restore the individual to well-being and to being a productive, caring member of the community.” Karetak and Tester, “Inuit,” 11-12.

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As Qitsualik-Tinsley has put it: “What do Inuit want? To be Inuit.”158 But all this time we have proceeded without asking what Inuit means. It would be a mistake, Qitsualik-

Tinsley reminds us, to think of “Inuit” as an equivalent to “humans” or “The People.”

This is a mistranslation, moving through the terms of Indigeneity. Qitsualik-Tinsley:

“[H]aving been a translator for 30 years, I can guarantee you that "Inuit" is a specific term. It precisely means, "The Living Ones Who Are Here." It denotes a sense of place, of having arrived, a memory that Inuit knew they had kin somewhere else. It also betrays the fact that Inuit once knew they were not the original peoples of their lands.”159 Keavy

Martin reads this claim by Qitsualik-Tinsley in the context of Inuit peoplehood. On the one hand, this definition shows that “the boundaries of Inuit peoplehood are not rigid,” which is to say that it is not premised on a mirroring of a Western Other, and yet “defines itself against the foil of subhuman others,” pre-Inuit inhabitance called Tuniit, while simultaneously acknowledging “affinity with them.”160 I am neither convinced nor settling with the “acknowledgement” of Inuit porosity as a border of peoplehood. Suffice it to say that while the borders of “Inuit” may be more open than routinely acknowledged,

“Inuit” gathers differently given rhetorical movements that are extensive to the Arctic or community. Rather than rest with a “simultaneous” acknowledgement-foil paradigm, I am more concerned with the future “of” Inuit in the context of rhetoricity and sovereignty.

Because of this, we will find that “Inuit” is a contest of the future.

In this particular contest in Baffin Bay, and two weeks before the court case,

Greenpeace elicited global activist participation with the “Clyde River Mobilization

Plan,” asking people to send “noise complaints” to newly-minted Prime Minister Justin

158 Qitsualik, “Want”. 159 Rachel Qitsualik, “Is It ‘Eskimo’ or ‘Inuit’?,” Indian Country Today, 11 February 2004, emphasis mine. 160 Martin, Stories, 27-36.

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Trudeau on social media. These “noise complaints” were ostensibly created to keep

Trudeau’s promises of nation-to-nation dialogue with Indigenous peoples intact, and therefore to keep pressure on, no less to maintain, Greenpeace’s agenda to prevent Arctic drilling. To this end, participants were asked to take “compelling photos,” like placing ear protectors on city statues, especially “Arctic or marine statues. Some of these compelling photos included statues of whales, polar bears, and children with ear protectors, metaphorically shielding them from the future of the proposed project and projecting them into the future where the seismic survey is, ideally, never welcomed back to the

Arctic.161 Greenpeace messaging stressed the need to respect Indigenous rights enshrined in the Canadian constitution, to recognize that Inuit had not consented to the seismic survey, and to “listen to Inuit concerns.” As the campaign was initiated out of “respect

[for] the community and a desire to amplify their voices,” Greenpeace recommended that anyone participating in the campaign refrain from using their branding. Still, in the campaign messaging, which sought to “let [Trudeau] know seismic blasting must be stopped,” the campaign equally stressed that “Indigenous rights must be respected” and that “our Arctic deserves protection.”162

The campaign culminated with a number of videos posted to the Greenpeace

Canada YouTube account. One video, “We Do Not Consent,”163 images of whales are juxtaposed against dramatic footage of underwater seismic blasts, overlaid with a droning and pulsing music. The video includes reference to free, prior, and informed consent

161 Participants were also called to tweet prepared messages and hashtags, and to call representatives with prepared messages. The prepared messages asked people from “[place]” and “[city]” to tweet #NoiseComplaint to Trudeau along with messages like “Listen to Inuit concerns and implement UNDRIP now. #IStandWithClydeRiver,” and “Inuit did not consent to seismic blasting. It is loud and dangerous and threatens their way of life. Respect Indigenous rights and #StopTheBlast now.” 162 Ibid. 163 Greenpeace Canada (2016), “We Do Not Consent,” 26 November 2016, YouTube, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYhKYT_p3E0

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(FPIC), and repeats that Clyde River Inuit did not consent to the blasting. A message appears: “People around the world are standing in solidarity with Clyde River Inuit to

DEFEND THESE DEFENDERS and say WE DO NOT CONSENT to the blatant disregard of Indigenous rights.”164 The video then cuts to clips of Inuit from Clyde River alongside celebrities—Jane Fonda, Naomi Klein, Emma Thompson, David Suzuki, Sarah

Harmer among them—all repeating, “we do not consent.” The video included an interview with actress Emma Thompson, dutifully wearing her “Save the Arctic” beanie, where she proleptically evokes the drilling, immanent to the seismic survey, so as to recall the horror of the future in advance. The oil companies, she says, “don’t care about our grandchildren,” and moreover they know that “conflict is going to escalate as water supplies decrease, as food security becomes more difficult—conflict worldwide will escalate. And what’s going to happen then?” Already Baffin Bay densely woven into this network or ecology of futures, where “low-lying territories like Bangladesh [and] even the Netherlands [will] get covered in water” and will “make the refugee crisis in Europe look like an away-day.” Inuit rights prefigure this equation primordially, as “defenders,” indicators of what is-to-come, where the end of the Arctic is granted in advance of the march of modernity, of progress, rendering its peoples an elegiac face of this reality—a reminder viewers are prompted to accept by minor chord piano cues and dramatic sweeping footage of whales, future Arctic travellers. “Climate change is a global phenomenon,” says Thompson, reminding us why she is present in Clyde River: because we are. “So what has happened is big oil companies who refused to recognize that we need to leave what’s in the ground in the ground if we’re going to survive.” Consent is both a language of Indigenous rights and a clarion call and an intensive rhythm of more-

164 Ibid.

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than that moves Indigenous consent in as a condition of a more-than-human planetary

“fragility” of appeal. The end of the world gathers together and this gathering issues acephalically, but this rhythmicity is already sovereignty of mistranslation, moved to the future of the end of the Arctic. Future is a contestation of the frontiers of the Arctic, wherein the uncertainties of climate and development, partnership and power, are negotiated rhetorically within the terms of consultation, consent, and its claims: adaptation and resilience and prevention, habitability and vulnerability, all of which Inuit express as the immanence “of” the Arctic, as an Arctic rhetoric for the planetary.

We might now return to Qitsualik-Tinsley’s reading of sovereignty to understand its terms as included within a rhythmic frame. Qitsualik-Tinsley cannot find Inuit sovereignty, what she calls toward as the enabling of coming into being, a granting of being in the world-toward-wellness, in aulatsigunnarniq. Rather, Inuit sovereignty is the unification of isuma, roughly “personality,” and tarniq, or “soul,” in the “triune cosmological structure” of Nuna (land), Imaq (Water, sea), and Sila (sky, mind, atmosphere, air, spirit, earth, universe, all, and 88 other meanings). Nuna is closely related to inua: “a root used extensively in denoting anything human (hence Inuit, or singular Inuk), it is also a significant factor in Inuit philosophy, being the human potentiality that may manifest or lie latent in all of existence, dependent upon related human awareness directed at a given aspect of that existence.”165 Yet this enablement is constantly thrown into confusion, or to the unknowable, by what she calls the Nuna’s nalunaqtuq nature, “that which causes confusion”: “[F]or each iota of what one believes to be known about the Land (i.e., nature), there is a great deal more; surprises that have yet to trip us up. An age-old caution is further implied in this term: For it is not to say that

165 Qitsualik, “Innumarik,” 29.

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there is nothing one can learn about the Land; but only that there is no end to what can be learned.” Perhaps we can consider the terms of nalunaqtuq in the context of the end, of a saving that is a defence of all life on Earth given in a plot where claiming, land, and sovereignty are all granted in a future proleptic. In trying to evoke the “traditional” form of Inuit sovereignty, Qitsualik-Tinsley suggests that Inuit, as a “continually flowing system” whose being in the Nuna constitutes but one part, substitutes terminus for the knowledge that any “disruption in this system, the loss or inability of any given factor to harmonize adequately with other factors, [can] educe catastrophe characterized by the

Land’s typically nalunaqtuq nature.”

The “ability to make things move” gestures, no doubt, to the rhetoricity of movement, routes, and futures writ into the land, communities human and not. But as

Qitsualik-Tinsley highlights, Inuit sovereignty is moved by the grammar of nalunaqtuq toward inunnguiniq, the rhythms of movement granted by what cannot be known or claimed in advance except as sovereignty. Perhaps aulatsigunnarniq is a rhythm through which rhetoric stages the opening of encounter with Inuit claims in Baffin Bay—enabled by the rhythms of different spaces, communities, knowledges, bodies, and peoples. But as an ability that moves, and is moving, premised not singularly on the rhetor or situation or sovereign, but rather on and within an always moving intersecting of relations “of” in- and-out, aulatsigunnarniq describes not a rhetoric “at” ends but rather “of” ends, void of obligations as they are variously disclosed and withdrawn. Rather than a rhythm that moves sovereignty, obligated only to its continuous opening of encounter, aulatsigunnarniq traces the ongoing necessity to return the sovereign.

Conclusion

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Consider again the Baffin Bay seismic survey, a purportedly failed proposal and successful campaign. If understood through case law, the Clyde River decision represented an affirmation and clarification of the constitutional duty to consult with

Indigenous peoples in Canada and the role of tribunals in carrying out this duty for the

Crown. Through what the Court called its “final word,” the proposal comes into being as a project. In a rather calculated sense, then, Clyde River ends with the opportunity for

Clyde River. We can only say that the proposal failed on the grounds that the project never took place, eventally. But it is precisely in this sense that the rhetoricity of the end, the movement shared between seemingly disparate propositions for the Arctic, grants passage into “shared future.”

The task of rhetoric, writes Davis, is not to locate a path outside. But the end of the world and the end of the Arctic are not synonyms. In the former, this “end” grants

“us” all as indigenous to rhetoricity en avance, in advance of an antecedence and anticipation that is in the advance, the movement of the turning toward the latter end “of” the Arctic. We share the world-as-enablement, in the movement of a for us, all of us, found and founded infinitely turned, vulnerably, toward the end. Us is enabled by the granting in habitability. But in this very same enablement is the granting to the Arctic as a human spacetime, the corpus of Arctic futurity. In this turn toward the vulnerability we all share, “Inuit” are moved to the misapplication of their terms—to “human being”— rather than to what, as Qitsualik-Tinsley reminds, is the specificity and politics of what the word properly references—“The Living Ones Who Are Here.” But there is no-where

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in the end for them to be, for the “we” is a moving rhetorical plane of being-and- relation.166

Perhaps the Arctic compels “us”—the melting permafrost persuades by threatening to release enough methane to compel run-away climate disaster [le désastre]; old ice melt persuades by darkening the ocean and compelling the sun to bathe it in light sans reflection; the sea rise persuades dis-placement by compelling the future-motions of animals, plants, humans, and tools as global migrants, everywhere at once. And so in this sense it is end that grants us in the future of the Arctic, outside of all geopolitical borders, beyond the honour of the Crown, before the duty to consult, after the land claim, and alongside consent and rights. But if here the end is what enables the “response-ability” of these rhetorics, it returns as aulatsigunnarniq. This isn’t only the iteration of future but the waiting to found its granting, naming the granting that enables the rhetoricity of the future—in the ability to make things move. If the Inuit invention of sovereignty understood that only the force of the Nuna has the ability to make things move, then rhetoricity returns the “connotations” of these forces back into what this invention reckons of Arctic rhetoric. But as Qitsualik-Tinsley writes, nalunaqtuq is the exceedingness of what can or what remains to be known—the nuna (not the world), the force that exceeds the totality of coming into being. Yet there is always the potential throwing into disrepair.

166 Though I contrast being-and-relation to being-in-relation—where, as Michael Bernard-Donals argues, following Deleuze, the relation of being and mobility is constituted in relational being-in-motion—their difference is not in contest. What enables the former from the latter, the turn from the vulnerability of being-in-relation, is the secret guarded by the future of mobility: that being is distended by the rhythms of its granting. This distended being relates to relation as a conjunctive, non-situational, saturated totality of world to its end. The future of this world, the enablement of its relation, is the risk of granting being-and-relation. See Michael Bernard-Donals, “Rhetorical Movement, Vulnerability, and Higher Education,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 52:1 (2019), 1-23.

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Consider for example the ringed seal, whose fur constituted one of the central arguments underpinning the discourses that eventually arrive to Baffin Bay in the seismic survey proposal. The seal has a long history to Inuit peoples in parts of the Arctic. But two things are worth mentioning. The introduction of the wage economy and the global economy with the settler state brought with it the valuation of seal fur. Prior to this, but also afterwards, the seal had no financial exchange value. It was only with the coming of the fur trade, and then later of humanitarian care and animal rights activisms, that the furs became an ethical issue that made the future of the seal a biopolitical lifetime.

Greenpeace famously campaigned against the seal hunt in the 1970s and 1980s. Though their collective efforts were successful in restricting the selling of furs to European markets for decades, and though they would eventually give permission, unrecognized by those markets, to Inuit hunters, the effect on Inuit economy, social life, and wellbeing was devastating. The image of seal fur was rendered tantamount to murder. The protection of the living body of the seal was primary. With the fur markets so affected, the restriction of hunting quotas, and the discursive stain on furs, the enablement of the living body of the seal defied traditional and long-standing Inuit relationality with the seal. In other words, it was the ongoing life of the seal that cut off the relation with Inuit. The living seal was dead. It is the dead seal that is living to Inuit, which in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit allows the seal to return. The living seal, the exceptional seal, never returns. This seal and its future is, in advance, the absent sovereign of rhetoricity.

This is how Arctic rhetoricity is at risk to the enablement, the rhythm, of Inuit and hunting, the future of Inuit—it extends the terms of nuna to the outside, and the claim within a continuum of being that grants this inseparability to its enablement. What returns and what becomes, what is and could be, what will be and what is not to be known, are all

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conditions of an enabling-in-separation. There could be no end “of” the Arctic to this granting, even if the Arctic is and always has been changing. To answer to the change at all requires a reaching into enablement to find, in the end, a granting that anticipated itself only after its capacity to suggest itself before itself, before before. The name for this enablement is “Inuit.” This is the future of Baffin Bay.

But the enablement of Arctic rhetoric, the end of the Arctic, is a risk of future, as its own name testifies—one that the materiality of rhetoricity routinely and openly admits. For such an enablement waits recursively for what is in advance: the demand, the call, the approach—all that must qualify and resonate with, without recognizing, the crisis, the coming, the shared future. These terms have the power of decision; for they make their demand in anticipation of an epistemological history where these conditions and terms were granted in advance of territory, land claim, and the metonymy of the final word. Rhetoricity returns to be granted in the openness of what moves moving-through.

Such is the risk of response-ability’s significations. So it is in this sense that the end of the

Arctic is enabled in this passage, for rhetoricity has made us indigenous to the Arctic as the future. So it is that rhetoricity makes move, makes “us” sovereign, chimerically. In the return of the future of these significations, these “connotations,” comes the risk of its enabling rhythmicity—the immanence of material rhetoricity.

Nalunaqtuq

There is a story recorded in Across Arctic America that confused Knud Rasmussen.167

Rasmussen, who wrote some of the foundational anthropological texts on pre-settlement

167 Knud Rasmussen was a Greenlandic-Danish explorer and ethnographer well-known for his catalogues and careful recording of Inuit legends, songs, practices, and ways of life. In his life, Rasmussen made seven total expeditions to the

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Inuit society, was travelling with a young Inuit man named Netsit, of the Netsilingmiut peoples. Netsit was accompanying Rasmussen to a seal hunting camp in Bathurst Inlet in the Kitikmeot Region, the western inland region of what is today known as Nunavut. In his telling, Rasmussen calls Netsit an “expert in folk tales,”168 and at the end of their first day they make a small hut in a snowdrift and settle in for the night. During their day of travel Netsit had been silent with Rasmussen, but in their hut Rasmussen asks Netset if he might share some stories. Netsit does, and ends with what Rasmussen calls an “odd little fable”169 called the Fox and the Wolf. I won’t retell the story as Rasmussen recorded it, but in the story a wolf asks a fox if it can teach it to fish for salmon. The fox brings the wolf to a crack in the ice of the frozen lake and instructs the wolf to put its tail in the frozen water until it feels a nibble and then yank it up. The fox cannily runs to a nearby bush to watch while the wolf’s tail freezes in the water. Realizing it’s now stuck, and having to bite its tail off, the wolf notices the fox watching over and runs toward it. The fox pulls a leaf from the bush and puts it over its eyes. This tricks the wolf, who asks the fox if he had seen the one who made him bite off his tail. No, replies the fox, for I have a snow blindness. The wolf then continues off in search of a different fox.

The end to this story makes no sense to Rasmussen. He asks Netsit: “what is it supposed to mean, exactly?”170 To this, Netsit responds in part: “It is only the white men who must always have reasons and meanings in everything. And that is why our elders always say we should treat white men as children who always want their own way. If they

circumpolar Arctic, collecting extensive records along the way. Rasmussen, Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition (New York: G.P Putnam and Sons, 1927). 168 Rasmussen Across, 253. 169 Ibid. 170 Ibid, 254.

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don’t get it, they make no end of a fuss.”171 Making no end of a fuss: Rasmussen was there waiting for the end in the beginning. All stories proceed toward an end, as the end presences in the opening. An opening gives its sense of ending there in the opening of the opened. It is as Deleuze once wrote of the proposition, “the philosophical error.” Netsit’s story didn’t merely lack a motive or an ending for Rasmussen, but without it the meaning carries on. The wolf wanders in- signification, searching the grounds of the tundra in search of what stole signification. This tail could not merely have been absent in the way that Rasmussen, there in the tent with Netsit, imagined it to be. The tail is the tale of prehension. But in Netsit’s telling, the story is given over as a way, story-telling.

Rasmussen granted the moral prior to the way. The moral, the meaning, the granting, was there to be in the story waiting, rather than the story as the way of the story, as it takes on in different ways, by different experiences in which it is told.

This is ultimately what the future of Baffin Bay gives over as an enablement. If sovereignty is in part the enablement of movement, then this constitutive sense of

“coming to an end” is granted to efface itself as the end-of—in the sense of bringing to an end, overcoming, replacing, rewriting, unmoving. For the Arctic, however, this coming to an end takes on a different meaning in light of the Inuit translation of sovereignty. This coming to an end is an overcoming, but reveals the movement that shores up the sovereign in its enabling repetition in the future. In the end of the Arctic, enablement is in the process of coming to an end, founded in the constitutive object of the Baffin Bay seismic survey and of Inuit struggle with it. As the future, the end of the Arctic serves not as the political struggle of overcoming—of climate change or development, as in the

171 Ibid.

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compelling of the overcoming—but rather as the ability to make things move, the enablement toward itself, to enable itself in the future of its granting.

The end of the Arctic is, therefore, what I’m calling the rhetoric of sovereignty in the Arctic, “Arctic rhetoric.” As this Arctic rhetoric is material and temporal, rational and mythical, and given in the future—the future as crisis, as shared humanity, as opening and closing—the end of the Arctic is rhythmic, which is to say “of” spacetime, and rhetoricity. To this end, Arctic rhetoric is both the end “of” and “of” rhythm, which is not to say instances of, or ways of speaking about or eliciting the future of the Arctic. Rather, it names the enablement of the granting “of” the end. This enablement is rhythmicity and sovereignty, such as it is its granting in the future. From this definition of rhythm, the future of Baffin Bay, evoked in the seismic survey project and the campaign to stop it, is, to echo Muckelbauer, a singular rhythm of enablement of this Arctic rhetoric as the turning toward the Arctic. Yet this immanent future is also the enablement of the other future, the one that, through rhetoricity at the end of the world—a rhythmicity that is the ability to make things move—emerges the future of Baffin Bay as the end of the Arctic, a contest of world and nuna, shared humanity and innua, end and nalunaqtuq. There has not only been a dialectical reversal of the movement of the end, from the to-come to some non-causal temporality of crisis “everywhere” or “all the way down.” Rather, the end “of” is in the way that rhetoricity gathers as a style and capacity of movement. If the worldly and crisis are with-out end, Baffin Bay in and as the Arctic—a globally plotted and a spatio-temporal point—will have been coming to the end “of” in advance, tomorrow and yesterday. And if anthropomorphic climate change has persuaded the Arctic into a kind of revolution, in response-ability and resilience, the end of the Arctic resettles in advance.

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What it could possibly mean to surrender to nalunaqtuq, for the kind of rhetoricity that, in Qitsualik-Tinsley’s reading, opens “Inuit,” I have tried to say only by turning away and misreading. And so this essay has essayed to ask an analogical question: when do you tell a story that doesn’t happen? It could be that it’s the wrong question, and the right time.

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Chapter 2: Life and Death of the Body of the Seal

An apology that begins with an image, a memory, and an old photograph: “A seal pup and a hunter—and a Greenpeace activist standing between them.”1 This is “an image,” imagines the apology, that Inuit have in mind when they think of Greenpeace. An old antagonism is evoked here, but of what kind? The Greenpeace apology to Inuit, for the

“impacts” of the anti-seal hunt campaign, answers for the history of the image, the memory, the photograph: the record, the representation, the past. Perhaps these can be put in more rhetorical registers: the apology answers (to) mimesis,2 metaphor, and repetition.

If the Greenpeace apology to Inuit speaks to a campaign moved to image-making, to representation, and to the relations that obtain “between,” is it an old antagonism of imitation?3 Perhaps the apology testifies first to this imitation: Inuit have an image of

1 Joanna Kerr, “Greenpeace Apology to Inuit for Impacts of the Seal Campaign,” Greenpeace Canada, 24 June 2014, accessed at: https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/5473/greenpeace-apology-to-inuit-for-impacts-of-seal- campaign/. 2 Richard McKeon pointed out that imitation appears to change guise in different contexts in which it’s evoked—as, for example, in the Platonic dialogues, where imitation is an image making function of truth where the word is given in a “huge matrix … possessed of an indefinite number of shades of meaning” determined by what pairs with it (McKeon “Imitation,” 13). To anticipate myself, we might usefully evoke the short film Tungijuq, which features Tanya Tagaq and filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk. Tungijuq, which translates to “shapeshifts,” features Tagaq as a being in different skins: a wolf hunting and killing a caribou, a half-woman half-caribou which shifts to a human laying on the floe edge clutching meat to her body or, in a potential-similar imagery, perhaps opened up like a seal. She falls into the water and becomes a seal swimming to the aglu (breathing hole), which is killed there. Finally, Tagaq is a human woman who sits with her husband, played by Kunuk, eating the raw meat of the seal Tagaq was. The opening of the seal is framed prominently, imitating a vulva, which Tagaq lovingly touches before putting a piece of meat into her mouth, finally looking into the camera. If mimesis is (in) a different skin—for Plato, for rhetoric, for Inuit, for imitative “practice”— then, as John Muckelbauer has argued, it is at least in some sense given, as McKeon also argued, by the imitative relation. As we will see, this imitative relation is central to contemporary Inuit sovereignty concerns. Richard McKeon, “Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity,” Modern Philology 34, no. 1 (1936), 1-35. See also John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism and the Problem of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 54; Tungijuq, directed by Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphäel (Igloolik: Igloolik Isuma Productions, 2009). 3 As Plato has the Eleatic Stranger tell Theaetetus: “The nature of difference appears to me to be cut up into pieces, just like knowledge” (Sophist 236c6-7). This of course names Plato’s method, not imitation. But this image of difference, of its nature, might very well trail the essay mimetically—for the sophist is a hunter of a different sort, and difference being cut into pieces is peripherally evoked here (231d3). Plato distinguishes between two kinds of imitation in the Sophist, what he calls “likeness-making” (236b3), “being like the original” (236a8), or, pace Muckelbauer, the repetition of the same, and “apparition-making” (236c4), what “appears to resemble the original but doesn’t” (236b8), or the repetition of difference. Analogically, the apology names the making of apparitions that, as a legal likeness, takes from the model. Plato, Sophist in Theaetetus and Sophist, edited by Christopher Rowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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Greenpeace (as image maker), and vice versa (as model), repeated in the body of the seal.

The formative image of this antagonism, the metaphor of life standing between giving and having death, is bare repetition. As Greenpeace put it, the anti-seal hunt campaign in the 1970s and 1980s was a monster moved by its own momentum,4 not intended to become this “life” standing between all “deaths” of the seal body. The apology names this imitation, revealing that the Greenpeace activist could never truly stand between this model relationship that Inuit have with the seal, for this is a “special relationship,” one that has “existed since time immemorial,”5 and which links the death to “food, clothing, and cultural purposes.”6 The model relation between the killer and the killed, then, emerges with the introduction of “time immemorial” into relationality,7 the model of relation. The Greenpeace apology to Inuit8 is therefore more than mea culpa: it is a retrospective apprehension of a shared and unifying vulnerability: “if we’re to have any hope of protecting our homes for future generations, of keeping the water and land free from oil spills and healthy enough for people to live and thrive on, then we must work together, in respect for each other, for the water, for the animals, and for this incredible

4 “Though the campaign was directed against the commercial hunting of seals—and not the small-scale, subsistence hunting carried out by Northern Indigenous and coastal peoples—we did not always communicate this clearly enough. The consequences of that, though unintended, were far-reaching … the campaign took on a life of its own and became global. Many other organizations were involved—culminating in, among other things, the U.S. ban on seal products and the EU ban on products originating from whitecoats.” Greenpeace, “Apology.” 5 Perhaps it’s a mere curiosity of the language that this “existence” since time immemorial encounters the “complicated time” of the 1970s and 1980s seal hunt and the concomitant US and European bans of seal “products.” But what would it mean that this complicated time could interrupt time immemorial? Greenpeace, ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 This is the excess of time that nullifies the death, and an excess of culture that affirms the life. An affirmation of life is precisely how Siila Watt-Cloutier asked non-Inuit to accept the blood on the ice. Not only that blood on the ice is an excessive relationality to the seal, but that it is a recognizable practice south of the tree-line, if not a repetition of the same then the similar, the imitation: “To us Inuit, the Arctic waters are much like the vegetable gardens of the south. The bounty of the waters connects us to each other, to our environment, and to our ancestry. Through our hunters who harvest and provide this highly nutritious organic food, our families and communities are richly fed. Blood on the ice and on our hands as we harvest our hunt is like blackened hands from the rich soil of those who garden for their food. It is all the same—we are all connected by the giving of our living planet. Next time you see images of blood on the ice or waters of the Arctic, think ‘affirmation of life, [sic] not ‘confirmation of death’.” “United Against Seismic Testing,” Facebook, 9 November 2016, accessed at: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Unite-Against-Seismic-Testing- 1391093554253151/posts/. 8 To, and for whom, “the time has come to set the record straight.” Greenpeace, “Apology.”

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planet that we all share.”9 The body of the seal splits in two. Saved in exception to Inuit, death returns to the externalized movement of capital, whose death dealing is un-related, the imitation of the model relation—so the universe to God,10 the “product” to seal. As

Inuit are the model relation to the seal, this relation testifies to a time immemorial relation of sharing among planetary beings.

John Muckelbauer has argued that imitation (repetition) is not in opposition to invention (difference), and can’t be.11 The model and the copy rhythm together by the

“dynamics that exist between them,”12 and any given imitative practice13 necessarily rhythms these dynamics to varying intensities. Given that the postmodern read on imitation turns away from the repetition of identity (whether a replica or a “take” of something that appears stable), repetition is therefore understood as movement through which, in encounter at different times, the relation of model and copy is given.

Rhetoricity as a form of movement has therefore facilitated a powerful (re)turn to ways that rhetoric shares-in-relation the more-than-human. When George A. Kennedy wondered what he was talking about,14 he found an inescapable rhetoricity that precedes

9 Greenpeace, “Apology,” emphasis mine. We might note, so to keep in mind, the shift from pronouns to articles, from “our” to “the”—our future, our homes, (that) we (all) share; the land, the water, this planet. More generally, Diane Davis (in some way) doesn’t disagree (in principle) with this animating principle of the apology: “Abandonment is, after all,” she writes, “what we share; the only commonality among we singularities is our finitude: that we are infinitely singular and all alone together.” Breaking Up [At] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2000), 254. 10 McKeon, “Imitation,” 11. 11 In this sense, “opposition” doesn’t only mean distinct-from but also a proximal relation of two qualities. That is to say, pace Deleuze, difference and repetition are not distinct/identities. Muckelbauer will add, correctly I think, that this doesn’t mean the abandonment of identificatory instances. Rather, non-opposition is a matter of movement: the coming upon instances is non-opposition. 12 Muckelbauer, Future, 56. Muckelbauer’s chapter on imitation, according to a footnote, “offers an implicit response to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.” What this means in part is not (only) that Muckelbauer is offering a “Deleuzian response,” whatever imitative practice that phrase might suggest about the content, but rather that the form of the argument is already imitative. I return to this point. 13 Muckelbauer finds three: repetition of the same (the replica), repetition of difference (invention), and difference and repetition (“inspiration”). 14 As Kennedy opens his well-known essay: “After spending much of my professional life teaching rhetoric, I began to wonder what I was talking about.” George Kennedy, “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 1 (1992), 1.

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language and is shared15 with non-human animals.16 As Diane Davis put it, Kennedy’s claim was mis-received because he “nonchalantly traversed this ostensibly ontological border, exposing the possibility that it is not one,” that it is “the fragile effect of a metaphysical prejudice.”17 Rhetoric, then, like text, reaches “us” in survivance,18 as the

“infinitely divisible limit, a site of exposure that joined what it also separated.”19 This site exposes (to, us) that the “wildly differential” relations between “we who call ourselves

‘human’ and those we call ‘animal’ are wildly differential rather than oppositional, and therefore that it’s no longer quite clear how to understand ‘us’ in the first place, how to determine the limits of ‘the human.’”20 But in what sense does this wildly differential relation, this infinitely divisible limit, confront the “presumption of a simple opposition,” which is the “very ground of ethics, politics, religion, and culture in the West,” and its

“almost cartoonish understanding” of who we are?21 To return to this old Arctic antagonism of the hunter and the seal with the Greenpeace activist in between: does the one-in-between disavow its cartoonish-we, evoked in seal bodies, in the avowal of the time immemorial relation (that we all share)? Perhaps this avowal, if it were one, would

15 Shared with non-human animals, yes. But as Debra Hawhee has recently argued, even the history of rhetoric “in the West” finds animals waiting for it in re-reading with a stress on “energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (Hawhee, Tooth, 11). The “sensuous and feeling dimensions” (ibid, 6) of rhetoricity “confound” its greatest theorists, like Aristotle—with whom Kennedy issued his hoot. Not only is rhetoricity shared with non-human animals, it is of them, in advance. Debra Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 16 Which is to say in the sense that immanence is a kind of inescapability that, all the same, moves. And so for Kennedy, rhetoric is a “form of energy” (ibid, 4). 17 Diane Davis, “Some Reflections on the Limit,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2017), 277. 18 “Rhetoric acts as a mechanism for survival by facilitating successful adaptation of an organism to environmental change.” Kennedy, “Hoot,” 10. Davis, alongside Derrida, concurs. See Diane Davis, “Rhetoricity at the End of the World,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017), 431-451. 19 Davis, “Reflections,” 277. 20 Ibid, 278. 21 Ibid, 279, emphasis mine.

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participate toward the composition of rhetoric’s bestial compendium22 while also disaffirming the ontological border that Kennedy “seemed” to cross to evoke a rhetorical energy.

But imitative practice is certainly a powerful energy of its own, already non- localizable to the human.23 Muckelbauer distinguishes the repetition of the imitative model and the alteration of the model from a third form of imitative encounter: inspiration. Inspiration is a kind of encounter that shares with bestial rhetoric an energy that “transmits a force of self-overcoming,”24 which is to say the model no longer casts

“it-self” as a determinate object (like the animal) of and for repetition, but rather “engages responsiveness itself.”25 In other words, what inspiration reveals about the model (and the copy) is the movement of “the capacity to respond itself”26 which resounds through difference and repetition, human and (as) more-than-human. This particular imitative encounter is the becoming-capable-of-response that is the movement, the transmission, of self-overcoming—of rhetoric. But if the movement of rhetoricity is this trace of self-

22 Though rhetoric has “always been bestial” (Gordon et al., “Bestiary,” 222), even though it’s been (troublingly?) Western. See Jeremy G. Gordon, Katherin D. Lind and Saul Kutnicki, “Introduction: A Rhetorical Bestiary,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2017). 23 Rhetoric has, at least in Vinciane Despret’s account, already extended what is there to the more-than-human world what, due to the preventions of experimentation biases, science hasn’t. Despret follows imitation, beginning with George Romanes, a student of Darwin, who returned to Darwin’s notes on bee behavioural changes to extracting pollen from the dwarf bean once bumblebees were introduced and extracted them differently (Despret, Animals, 8). Romanes appears to understand “the imitation turns out to be what provokes the break or variation,” but he never follows through on this “bifurcation” (ibid, 9). Imitation, for Romanes, is merely rendered a lesser being on the hierarchy of invention and intelligence. Moving to the debates of the 1980s, especially issuing from Michael Tomasello’s well-known article “Do Apes Ape?” Despret finds scientific experimentation itself as a withholding of imitation to apes—apes “emulate,” they imitate imitation, but they do not imitate (ibid, 12). The debate lingers with experimenters “pretending” to test for imitation (ibid, 13). Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, translated by Brett Buchanan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 24 Muckelbauer, Future, 75. One must keep in mind, however, that for Muckelbauer self-overcoming is coincident with tradition: “tradition is nothing other than its own self-overcoming” (ibid, 165). The self-overcoming, this is to say, doesn’t suggest an outside as pure difference. Rather, the overcoming is the orientation or “capacity” toward the immanent intensity of what grants singularity. Inspiration, therefore, doesn’t “explode” the singularity into the outside so much as it turns, or perhaps folds into the rhythmicity of emergence (as a granting). This enablement of the granting (emergence) is one of the constitutive features of contemporary rhetorics of ecology, materialism, and posthumanism. 25 Ibid, 73. 26 Ibid, 76.

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overcoming, where even imitation resounds with the undercurrent of capacity-for responsiveness that precludes all beginnings, and therefore all singularities, what becomes of the Inuit relation of time immemoriality?27 This essay answers to that question with a contemporary social media campaign that staged an Inuit relation to the seal, called the

#sealfie.28

Inuit relation to the seal in contemporary discourse names a matter of sovereign exception29 in several different registers, but that all share in “sharing.” The Greenpeace apology names a familiar instance of this sharing: “we too must be open to change. Open to examining ourselves, our history, and the impact our campaigns have had, and to constantly reassessing ourselves.”30 Familiar, because the future of the Arctic, and therefore the world, is threatened by the divisions opened in closure31—only through an openness to openness is there a prevention of the ends that move (in) the Arctic.

Moreover, as imagined by a posthuman rhetoricity, radical openness is an enablement of

27 The we that this rhetoricity has recognized in nonrecognition—not just Inuit, “the living ones who are here,” but seals as well. 28 To call the #sealfie a campaign, however, refers to a very delimited temporal frame, beginning in March 2014 and roughly two resurgences of the hashtag, extending after Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s documentary Angry Inuk won the Hot Docs audience award in May 2016 (“‘Angry Inuk’ Wins Audience Award and $25K Prize at Hot Docs Festival,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News, 9 May 2016, accessed at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/angry- inuk-hot-docs-award-1.3574182) and its airing on CBC-TV in January 2018 (“How One Documentary Is Changing People’s Minds About the Seal Hunt,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 7 January 2018, accessed at: https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/how-one-documentary-is-changing-peoples-minds-about-the-inuit-seal-hunt). As Knezevik, Pasho, and Dobson (2018) found, the hashtag has changed form several times on Twitter. While, in the context of the “campaign,” the hashtag emerged in controversy and as a potential “site of discussion” (Knezevik et al., “Sealfie,” 424), it “evolved to almost exclusively include tweets in support of sealing” (ibid). They continue: “Between 2014 and 2016, the hashtag was often used for tweets on settler sealing in Newfoundland and Labrador,” before emerging in relation to Angry Inuk and “to more deliberately rally Twitter users around Inuit rights and more broadly Indigenous rights” (ibid). See Irena Knezevik, Julie Pasho and Kathy Dobson, “Seal Hunts in Canada and on Twitter: Exploring the Tensions Between Indigenous Rights and Animal Rights with #Sealfie,” Canadian Journal of Communication 43 (2018), 421-39. See also Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, Angry Inuk (Montréal: National Film Board of Canada, 2016). 29 Two examples: as a rights-based discourse, as through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and as an exemption to European Union bans on the sale of “seal products.” 30 Greenpeace, “Apology,” emphasis mine. 31 Elsewhere I have named this the “end of the Arctic.”

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granting sharing-in-relation, of finite futures “to-come.”32 Maybe this is because the shared relation is constitutive not of a model relation, but what Muckelbauer named a common (koinos, as “the Common”) intensity, “an immanent social function within the dynamic of identification itself.”33 In other words, the common names not the constitution of ontological ground shared between stable identities, but rather what grants the movement of identity to begin with.34 This, “it-self,” is a “necessarily unidentifiable” movement35 that grounds the conditions of identifiability. For Muckelbauer this doesn’t mean a dispensation with identity but rather a return (“of” that identity) to the conditioning movement that grants. To this end, doxa36 “is nothing other than a kind of immersion in and resonance with the rhythm of the common, a rhythm that immanently structures the very emergence of these poles.”37 The individual is the “singular rhythm” of what moves immanently to grant the polar, as it were. To have followed this reading,

Inuit would convene a non-Western rhythm of this common intensity that comes-to-be recognized38—perhaps in some form of misreading39—given (in) planetary crises like

32 Elsewhere, I have named this enablement of granting the constitutive rhetoricity of “Arctic rhetoric,” enabled through the “end of the Arctic.” I am only implicitly working with these terms here. 33 Muckelbauer, Future, 160. 34 Or more properly in these terms: to-begin-with. 35 Ibid, 161. 36 Usually defined as “belief” or “opinion,” as distinct from true knowledge (episteme). 37 Ibid, 162, emphasis mine. 38 Two moves, here. The first is an acknowledgement of what Muckelbauer has called the “principle of nonrecognition” (ibid, 47), which is a methodological practice, even a methodological failure, that he employs in his work to approach a concept without, on the one hand, presuppositions and, on the other, as an engagement with a text without explicit reference to that text in the engagement (what he calls an “unrecognized responsiveness”). The second is that recognition, as a form of repetition—for recognition seems to require apprehension, as a being-stilled—is for posthuman rhetoricity always the coming-to-be-recognized. In other words, recognition is regarded, returned, to difference and (as, in) repetition, in the movement coming-to-be. The “time of invention,” of difference or unrecognizability, is instantiated only in repetition or recognition (ibid, 165). Said another way, if the future is imagined as difference, it is only “actualized” by what immanently structures it: recognition, the past, the same. I draw out this form of recognition (as the vehicle for nonrecogniton, in coming-to-be-recognized) so to acknowledge that the acknowledgement of unrecognized responsiveness is a movement of the future—not only of invention, as Muckelbauer’s book “ends” on, but rather of post-x rhetoricity, or what Diane Davis has elsewhere called “rhetoricity at the end of the world.”

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climate change. And the only commonality singularities share, reminds Davis, is finitude.40 This finitude, or “common intensity,” names the abandonment to world issued by the deaths of God and Man in western philosophies.41 As Davis put it: “We have been abandoned to a free-fall.”42 This free-fall demands attendance to the “overflowing multiplicities that surround us, that are us,” and which gets left out by the abstractions of genus, species, Reason.43 What this means, if it’s taken seriously, is that Inuit relation is moved to/in the “future,”44 where the future names not a sequence or causal link, but an immanent enablement of granting, given in a line of (mis-) readings.45 While life and

39 To recall Davis: while every reading is a misreading there are misreadings of what she calls good faith and bad faith, the latter of which engage in a “dis-missal,” a kind of misreading (not “equal” to the other) that “shields” (or prevents) from what “might have been read” in “[mis]dismissings.” Davis, Breaking Up, 255-56. 40 Davis, Breaking Up, 254. Elsewhere, and later, Davis writes: “The power and the capacity assumed by the I covers over a more fundamental vulnerability and exposedness …There can be no saying ‘I’ [or autodeixis, the self-distancing of self-reflective Self] or doing I that is not already a citation, an imitation” (Davis, “Autozoography,” 544). Such as it is, autodeixis is merely repetition, one shared insofar as it is the repetition that grants originary repetition: “The ‘autos’ (the identity of the same) names a differential effect with no ontological foundation; it’s generated through an originary capacity to be repeated” (ibid, 546). That is to say, to be (finite) is already to be imitation—there is no ontological ground at all, and finitude names this imitation as survivance. Life and death “divides itself,” as an always-available-for “reanimation” (ibid, 547). See Diane Davis, “Autozoography: Notes Toward a Rhetoricity of the Living,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014), 533-53. 41 Or the death of the Sovereign—“but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. —And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Naukhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109. 42 Davis, Breaking Up, 254. 43 Ibid, 257. 44 Recall a moment in Derrida, in dialogue with Nancy: “Nothing should be excluded,” Derrida responds to Nancy, who seemed to think Derrida was effacing only the limit between “Man” and “animal.” Not so: “The difference between ‘animal’ and ‘vegetal’ also remains problematic” (Derrida, “Eating,” 105-106). Davis concurs strongly here: “we have only just begun to acknowledge and attend to the ways other rhetorical beings address and respond to one another and to the psychical and environmental constraints and opportunities that have shaped their particular evolution” (Davis, “Limit,” 283). But as I’ve written in note 38, acknowledgement of unrecognized responsiveness is a movement of the future insofar as that acknowledgment is already an immanent granting of nonrecognition. Nonrecognition, or unrecognizability, actualizes in and through recognition, as acknowledgement. As Derrida and Davis both acknowledge, the future is the acknowledgement of the unrecognized (qua) responsiveness. When I write that Inuit relation is moved in/to the future, I am naming an anticipated acknowledgement of nonrecognition that is the movement of effacement. Davis: “animal rhetors are not the final frontier for rhetorical studies” (ibid). In a note to this claim, she clarifies: “I am nodding here not only to vegetal beings but also to other interlocutors at the limits of ‘the human,’ including ‘the dead,’ ‘the divine,’ ‘the thing,’ and/or ‘object’” (ibid). As such, all modes of Inuit relation are already immanent to sharing-in-relation, a subject either of the first or second finitude, and therefore moved to/in the future. It’s in this future where “we” wait for the body of the seal. See Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’, or The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview With Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1991), 96-119. 45 Consider an oft-cited example of Indigenous resistance in Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus. In Simpson’s very sophisticated account is the story of a refusal of the gift: “The Mohawks of Kanawà:ke are nationals of a pre-contact Indigenous polity that simply refuse to stop being themselves. In other words, they insist on being and acting as peoples

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death in the body of the seal is already a matter of both apology to Indigenous peoples and, as Wolfe put it, “before the law,”46 it’s also already sharing-in-relation.47 But today sharing is renewed and emerges in the Arctic as a condition of planetary crisis to habitability, where the body of the seal grants future, at once vulnerable as a product of life-taking and excepted as (in) a condition of immemoriality. In the mediatized

“afterlife” of food and the Arctic, life lived in the living body splits along the line. It is this future, both as “in” bodies and sharing-“in”-relation, which moves life back into the body of the seal.

Selfie, Sealfie

At the 2014 Academy Awards, Ellen DeGeneres took a photograph48 with a Samsung phone that became, until 2017,49 the most retweeted photo.50 The photograph was a

who belong to a nation other than the United States or Canada” (Mohawk, 2). This refusal of citizenship—or otherwise of a “politically being Iroquois” (ibid)—is registered as a conflict and crisis, one that Simpson is right to note is the life of colonialism “in a settler form” (ibid). But what this also means is that Kanawà:ke is a “space with entries and exits” (ibid, 9), and so “genealogic authority” is a presence of it. This is what Simpson calls a nested sovereignty, a sovereignty “within sovereignty” (ibid, 10). So for Simpson, sovereignty goes down and recognizes as refusal the fashioning of homogenized heterogeneity (ibid, 18). Refusal, as Simpson argues throughout her book, is also a condition of what is not said, even in the condition where the saying says only what does not contribute to a scholarly and political claim like “refusal” (ibid, 113). Understanding, even diffuse, even fitful, can be “apprehension” (ibid, 178), and a colonial disappearance of a “past that stems from another time … and a past that gets pushed forward into the present” (ibid, 187). And if that movement keeps going, before beginning, not a sequential past to future, but as a movement in the future to-be-actualized by this stemming? Yet I abandon this line now, as a misreading, too, for Interruptus, whether as refusal or disaffiliation (ibid, 16) doesn’t move beyond the tree-line. See Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 46 What Wolfe argues is “central to biopolitical thought” in general (Wolfe, Before, 8): “‘before’ in the sense of that which is ontologically and/or logically antecedent to the law, which exists prior to the moment when the law … enacts its originary violence, installs its frame for who’s in and who’s out,” and too “in the sense of standing before the judgment of a law that is inscrutable not just because it establishes by fiat who falls inside and outside the frame, but also because it disavows its own contingency through violence; namely, the violence of sacrifice for which the distinction between human and animal has historically been bedrock” (ibid, 9). This is to say the life and death of the seal becomes a renewed and recirculated matter of framing exceptionality in the context of apology. Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 47 That is, to rhetoricities sans sovereigns, ends, entries. 48 Ellen DeGeneres, Twitter post, 2 March 2014, https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/440322224407314432. 49 In April 2017, Carter Wilkerson tweeted to the Wendy’s Twitter account, “Yo @Wendys how many retweets for a year of chicken nuggets?” The Wendy’s account sarcastically retweeted “18 million.” Wilkerson took a screenshot of this exchange and, in the tweet that beat #selfie, wrote: “HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS.” Though the tweet only received 3.5 million retweets, Wendy’s honoured the deal. Carter Wilkerson, Twitter post, 5 April 2017, https://twitter.com/carterjwm/status/849813577770778624/photo/1. Later that year, in December 2017, Tyson Foods,

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catchy celebrity-studded #selfie that included, among others, Meryl Streep, Bradley

Cooper, and Kevin Spacey. Samsung was very pleased with the outcome, writing that they “were delighted to see Ellen organically incorporate the device into the selfie moment that had everyone talking.” Due to this “great surprise for everyone,” they continued, and “in honor of this epic moment … we wanted to make a donation to Ellen’s charities of choice: St Jude’s and the Humane Society. Samsung will donate 1.5 million dollars to each charity.”51 DeGeneres and the Humane Society International are both very critical opponents to the commercial seal hunt. On her website, DeGeneres wrote of the hunt that it is “one of the most atrocious and inhumane acts against animals allowed by any government.”52

The #sealfie therefore seems to begin as a kind of imitation to the #selfie, as a reversal of its model. The model is, as Arnaquq-Baril makes clear in Angry Inuk, “going viral,” or otherwise exerting an influence over the energy that exercises itself on economy. If the #selfie is the hidden expressions that save the animal by ending the which supplies chicken to Wendy’s, faced a controversy after a video from Virginia surfaced of workers throwing and kicking, and impaling chickens. The video also showed that sick “birds are stacked in buckets and crushed as workers stomp them to death.” Kate Taylor, “Undercover Footage Shows Chickens Being Kicked and Impaled at a Farm that Reportedly Supplies Tyson Foods,” Business Insider, 6 December 2017, accessed at https://www.businessinsider.com/tyson-foods-animal-abuse-report-2017-12. 50 The photo was retweeted over 3 million times. Caspar Llewellyn Smith, “Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars Selfie Beats Obama Retweet Record on Twitter,” The Guardian, 3 March 2014, accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/03/ellen-degeneres-selfie-retweet-obama. 51 Anthony Ha, “Samsung to Donate $3M To Charities Chosen By Ellen, Says It Was Included ‘Organically’ In Her Oscar Selfie,” Tech Crunch, 3 March 2014, accessed at https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/03/samsung-ellen-selfie- donation/. It turned out the #selfie was a kind of advertisement. As Fred Graver wrote for Medium in 2017, “Samsung had paid a lot of money that year to be a sponsor of the Oscars” and were concerned while watching DeGeneres practice for this selfie with her “beloved” iPhone. Samsung then contacted Twitter’s “ad sales person, Matt Derella. They weren’t saying ‘Kill it,’ but they were saying ‘Isn’t there another way?’” It turned out, there was. “Ellen was presented with a tray of different Samsung phones. Each of them was pre-set for a selfie, all she’d have to do was press the button.” Because “everyone behaved well,” and “professionally,” writes Graver, Samsung donated to DeGeneres’ charity “after all.” See Fred Graver, “The True Story of the ‘Ellen Selfie’,” Medium, 23 February 2017, accessed at https://medium.com/@fredgraver/the-true-story-of-the-ellen-selfie-eb8035c9b34d. 52 DeGeneres would never respond to the #sealfie. And as of April 2018 she is still vocally anti-seal. In an Instagram post celebrating PETA India’s banning of seal fur sales, DeGeneres wrote: “It’s only a matter of time before the commercial seal slaughter is a thing of the past.” Ellen DeGeneres, Instagram post, 5 April 2018, accessed at https://www.instagram.com/p/BhNG0TjgZoi/?utm_source=ig_embed. See also Aaron Hutchins, “Dear Ellen: Seal Hunters Are People Too,” Macleans, 25 March 2014, accessed at https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadians- speak-up-against-ellens-anti-seal-hunt-cause/.

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economy, the #sealfie appears to mimic through difference: the silenced voice of caretaking that saves the animal by saving the economy. First initiated on social media by three Inuit women—poet Laakukuk Williamson Bathory, musician Nancy Mike, and

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, all from Iqaluit, Nunavut—the campaign included “people posting photos of themselves (often mentioning @theellenshow) with seal meat, seal accessories, and in their sealskin Sunday best.”53 But in the way the #selfie imitated inspiration, and therefore reproduced the masking of its economic intent, the #sealfie doesn’t merely respond, reactively, to #selfie as a copy to its model. Nor does the #sealfie merely “respond” to the collapse of the seal economy since the 1983 and 2008 EU bans on seal products,54 or animal rights campaigns conducted since the mid-1970s by the

IFAW, Greenpeace, PETA, and others. As with the consultation room, the #sealfie initiates occasions of address: to food security, to sovereignty, to suicide and education, to historical trauma, to housing shortages, and to self-determination. According to Mike:

“When someone like Ellen, or anybody who’s a celebrity or is well known, says

53 Dave Bean, “We Spoke to the Inuit Women Behind ‘Sealfies’,” VICE News, 31 March 2014, accessed at https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/3b47x8/we-spoke-to-the-inuit-women-behind-sealfies. 54 Regulation (EU) 2015/1775 of Regulation (EC) No 1007/2009 on trade in seal products and repealing Commission Regulation (EU) No 737/2010 states: “seal hunting is an integral part of the socio-economy, nutrition, culture and identity of the Inuit and other indigenous communities, making a major contribution to their subsistence and development, providing food and income to support the life and sustainable livelihood of the community, preserving and continuing the traditional existence of the community. For those reasons, seal hunts traditionally conducted by Inuit and other indigenous communities do not raise the same public moral concerns as seal hunts conducted primarily for commercial reasons” (2). Having said that, sale of seal products from Inuit and other Indigenous communities is “conditional upon those hunts being conducted with due regard to animal welfare in a manner which reduces pain, distress, fear or other forms of suffering experienced by the animals hunted to the extent possible, while taking into consideration the way of life of the Inuit and other indigenous communities and the subsistence purpose of the hunt” (3). Arnaquq-Baril offers a documentary-length retort to these exemptions in Angry Inuk, but she first responded through her YouTube account using the #sealfie, explaining why the EU exemption “does nothing” for Inuit. In part, Inuit argued against a total ban by arguing for certification, labelling schemes to source the skin, and regulation based on killing techniques, scientific data. In response, the Humane Society of the United States, Greenpeace, IFAW, and others, “spent a lot of money” to show how these schemes “don’t work, they’re prone to holes, [and] they’re too weak.” In other words, Inuit were being outspent and anticipated by heavily funded animal welfare groups—an outcome that repeats in Angry Inuk during the 2008 EU vote to renew the ban on seal products. IFAW erected a massive blow-up seal icon, activists were handing out whitecoat seal plush toys to voting members, and spent months lobbying in favour of the ban. Ergo, like the #selfie, the Inuit exemption conceals the transit of money that renders Inuit economy as a matter of nonrecognition. See Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, “#sealfie - Alethea's Exhausted Attempt to Answer ChefsForSeals Question Re Certification,” Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, YouTube video, 10 April 2014, accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK2PJS7RynA.

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something [against the seal hunt], it’s attacking us as minority groups because we not only use the seal as a practical thing, we use it to build relationships.”55

But this essay is not, it could not be, a recasting of the seal hunt debate as it has played out since the 1960s until it restages as the #sealfie. Though, as Arnaquq-Baril said in Angry Inuk, “I wanted to make this film because it bothered me when I saw animal welfare groups portray seal hunting as an evil and greedy thing. The images and statements they put out don’t reflect the seal hunting I know.”56 The “false reflections” of this debate, culminating in the ban on seal “products,” and what has roundly been acknowledged as the catastrophic effects on Inuit economies, has long been a matter of scholarly concern.57 The relation of this animal rights debate as a false image, which repeats in the Greenpeace apology to Inuit, and the Indigenous livelihoods and economies they impact by proxy (as a mode of nonrecognition), is necessarily woven into the

#sealfie’s mediatory circulation. But this essay doesn’t read the #sealfie as a refusal either—whether as a counterclaim, contra the settler state, or through Inuit rhetorics of

55 Ibid. These relations are of course rendered an inaudible, inaccessible, and impractical part of what is largely figured as a hunter-hunted subsistence economy by advocacy and welfare groups, policy makers, and popular media. For example, within weeks of the #sealfie campaign, Rebecca Aldworth of the Canadian arm of Humane Society clarified their position on what they called “socially accepted Inuit subsistence hunt,” writing: “Unlike Inuit sealers, commercial sealers almost exclusively target baby seals who are less than three months old. Inuit hunters kill seals primarily for meat.” It is the trope of the “baby seal” that animates this distinction, an iconic soft white fur, black tear-stained eyes, whose short life, too short, is always emphasized. A killing that cannot be sanctioned, a life that must be protected, the life of the “baby seal” stands against the meat of the mature seal, the seal of the Inuit, socially accepted because it is a creature of subsistence in time immemorial—a subsistence of meat, the covenant of survival. See “Humane Society Says It Doesn’t Oppose Inuit Seal Hunt,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 8 April 2014, accessed at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/humane-society-says-it-doesn-t-oppose-inuit-seal-hunt-1.2603306 56 Arnaquq-Baril, Angry Inuk. 57 For a comprehensive history from a legal perspective, see Nikolas Sellheim, The Seal Hunt: Cultures, Economies, and Legal Regimes (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2018). See especially George Wenzel, “The Harp-Seal Controversy and the Inuit Economy,” Arctic 31, no. 1 (1978), 3-6; “‘I Was Once Independent’: The Southern Seal Protest and Inuit,” Anthropologica 29, no. 2 (1987), 195-210; Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). In an interview in 2018, Wenzel makes an essential comment. After remarking Inuit relation to seals as a “social currency,” an essential component of Inuit kinship relations, Wenzel comments: “Inuit are dealing with all the things they dealt with a hundred years ago—the weather, changes in the animal population, and so on—plus now the environment includes the politics of animals. And so the only way to have animals is to hunt animals … Part of treating animals properly is to hunt them … The most important thing about hunting animals, this is by Inuit, I was told, is to think properly about animals. If you don’t think properly, you’re not going to catch animals.” See “Seal Hunting in Nunavut, Canada,” 4 April 2018, YouTube, accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRBbDZY5IYA, emphasis mine.

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the seal in the campaign.58 Rather, I find that I can only offer an implicit engagement with the #sealfie by attempting to approach the body of the seal in imitation. For it is imitation that grants the body of the seal to rhetorics, in flesh and finitude, and it is this, I hope to show, that the #sealfie encounters before Inuit.

Nevertheless, the relatively few articles about the #sealfie campaign59 have focused on the ways it participated in an active disruption to dominant framing narratives—whether of the relation of human and seal ontology, of Inuit cultural practices as self- or peoplehood, or toward the importance of broader social understanding in the context of climate change. This latter goal is a crucial one. Inuit response, Arnaquq-Baril offers, does not look like animal rights rhetorics or like other Indigenous refusals. As she tentatively closes her film, mirroring its opening with a hope for the future as a return of hunting in the young, she says: “It’s time for a new model of animal activism, and I hope the world will see that we, as Inuit, should be a part of it.”60 It would be easy to argue, and not unfairly, that the #sealfie is one way to show that Inuit response to seal bans and animal protection is already a matter of misrecognition and imitation of a sort—one that, then, needs a “new model.” So in her article, Allison K. Athens contrasts the rhetoric of animal rights activists with those of Inuit, the former repeating a “saving and killing” narrative that situates humans as ontologically distinct from seals and other non-human animals, and the latter which act as “border-crossers,” speaking to a “complex circularity

58 To do so on my part, as we will see, would be an imitation. 59 After the release of Angry Inuk, which focused on the impacts of the seal debate in the Inuit Nunangat—what Arnaquq-Baril said was “the core of the problem” (Arnaquq-Baril 2016)—there has (at the time of this writing) been an increased scholarly interest in the #sealfie campaign. See “Q&A with Alethea Arnaquq-Baril – ANGRY INUK,” Cinema Politica, 12 November 2016, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPVxtVZGkss. 60 Arnaquq-Baril, Angry Inuk.

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of relationships” whose “relational systems” suggest interrelation.61 In another article,

Elizabeth Rule situates the routinely violent responses to different “sealfies,” especially directed at throat-singer and experimental artist Tanya Tagaq’s March 2014 tweet,62 as embedded in an ongoing neo-colonial erasure of Indigenous, and especially Indigenous women’s voices, peoplehood, and “cultural ways.”63 But these responses are in an implicit exchange, if not already an imitation of what I’ve described as the rhetorical sharing-in-relation that is given not only in contemporary rhetorics that seek to escape the sovereign (rhetor) toward the “bestiary,” but also in the contexts of climate change where the Arctic is plotted as the first victim to stressors of planetary vulnerabilities. How could time immemoriality therefore not structure a given relational being toward the more-than- human that was in advance of koinos, of finitude, and of rhetoricity at the end of the world? Rule sets her analysis within the frame of “settler environmentalism,” or a “settler brand of environmentalism,”64 which distinguishes—implicitly and explicitly—from these Inuit cultural ways, whereby “traditional hunting,” “in accordance with Inuit

61 The division between the model and the copy is visible in this reading, and so too the excessive movement of difference, insofar as the constitutive feature of the #sealfie, couched in Inuit relation, continuously redefines the border-crosser. See Allison K. Athens, “Saviors, ‘Sealfies,’ and Seals: Strategies for Self-Representation in Contemporary Inuit Films,” Ecozon@ 5, no. 2 (2014), 47. Emiliano Battistini repeats a similar model by arguing that the campaign stages two “opposed ontologies” (Battistani, “Sealfie,” 588), with the body of the seal acting as the “friction point between two different cultures … and, accordingly, two different politics of food” (ibid). In this sense the campaign becomes a possibility for Inuit to stage encounter in a space between two “semiospheres” (562), a “taking voice inside” that allows for “a dialogue between equals” (591). In both Athens and Battistani’s readings, the campaign initiates the repetition of the model relationship, between Inuit and seal, as a disruption—this allows for words like “dynamic,” “across” (Athens 54), “between” (Athens ibid; Battistani 591), and “translate” (Battistani ibid) to affirm an “Inuit response” to animal rights rhetorics of life and death. I can’t speak in these affirmative terms, for I would risk a shattering rhetoric. See Battistani, “‘Sealfie,’ ‘Phoque You’ and ‘Animism’: The Canadian Inuit Answer to the United- States Anti-Sealing Activism,” Int J Semiot Law 31 (2018), 561-94. 62 To which I will return. Tagaq has since deleted the March 2014 tweet. But there are a series of engagements on the same day remain which mirror, mimetically and metonymically, the reading I offer here. After her “barbaric culture,” which needs to “bash skulls for food,” is criticized by one user, Tagaq responds with photograph from a Northern grocery store showing cans of ravioli for sale at $16.29 CAD/each. See: Tanya Tagaq, Twitter post, 28 March 2014, accessed at https://twitter.com/tagaq/status/449760613695102976. 63 Elizabeth Rule, “Seals, Sealfies, and the Settler State: Indigenous Motherhood and Gendered Violence in Canada,” American Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2018), 743. 64 Ibid, 744.

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subsistence living,”65 emerges as a “nonviolent act wherein the hunted give of themselves and the hunters perform the task humanely, and then use their resources in a sustainable manner and show generosity toward others.”66 This is a fair reading that Arnaquq-Baril also endorses in her documentary. And according to Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and traditional laws,67 a reciprocal relation between Inuit and seal that does indeed imply a

“giving of.”68 Yet to emerge the giving-of, the non-violence, and the subsistence of the seal body, Rule cites Charlotte Coté’s Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors, which focuses specifically on the whaling traditions of the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth nations from the

Pacific Northwest (Washington and Vancouver Island, respectively). As Arnaquq-Baril has argued, the very terms of Inuit subsistence hunting as an exception undermine the capacity for the subsistence of the subsistence hunt by rendering Inuit participation in the global market economy inessential. But the giving-of and the subsistence can’t answer to what moves them merely by evoking them as a capacity or responsiveness. And certainly the non-Indigenous seal hunt off the coast of Newfoundland is also “hunted humanely,

65 Ibid, 741. 66 Ibid, 745, emphasis mine. 67 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit translates to “what Inuit have always known to be true,” or sometimes “what Inuit have known for a long time” (see Keavy Martin, Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature [Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012], 98). The word Inuk, write Jarich Oosten and Frédéric Laugrand, which is generally understood to mean “person,” the singular of “Inuit,” mistranslated to “the people” or sometimes “human beings,” “also conveys the meaning owner, inhabitant, and for inanimate objects, spirit. But the notion of ownership of the land differs from a Western perspective. Other people have access to the land to hunt even though they may be strangers.” See Mariano Aupilaarjuk, et al., Interviewing Inuit Elders: Perspectives on Traditional Law, edited by Jarich Oosten, Frédéric Laugrand, and Wim Rasing (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 1999), 133. 68 Keavy Martin argues that, although the appearance of hunting has changed, “it is still embedded in an ancient tradition of relations between humans and animals. The maintaining of this relationship,” she continues, “is of the utmost importance to Inuit, whose survival has depended on it for thousands of years” (Martin, “Hunting,” 450). In this essay, Martin suggests that Inuit texts should be regarded as meat, as nourishment, that are offered and, in offering, open to a being in relation to. This means, on the one hand, that the engagement with these texts is one of butchering (ibid, 454), and, on the other, a seeking of a relational state that is non-assimilative or appropriative (ibid). This is an interesting and purposeful engagement. But as I have been arguing, sharing-in-relation is an imitative practice of moving relation to the future, where the “capacity” to respond becomes responsiveness before identity. In this sense, Inuit can never be “the living ones who are here,” for there is no here, no living, no “we” that can nourish. Keavy Martin, “On the Hunting and Harvesting of Inuit Literature,” in Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures, edited by Deanna Reader and Linda M. Morra (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2016), 445-58.

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legally”69 in the eyes of the settler state. So in Rule’s argument, from which this essay departs, the “non-violence” of the Inuit hunt, and therefore the exception from “settler environmentalism,” rests too squarely on the repetition of the condition of time immemoriality as a model relation that Inuit introduce difference into. The #sealfie doesn’t just introduce difference into repetition, it responds to the knife.

Though the anti-seal campaign is often associated with Greenpeace and Bridgette

Bardot hugging a whitecoat pup, it was a 1964 Radio-Canada broadcast of a documentary from Artek Film called Les Grands Phoques de la banquise70 that sparked global condemnation of the “Canadian seal hunt.”71 The documentary opens with a car driving along the dense snowbound roads of Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine, Québec, in the Gulf of

Saint Lawrence, off the coast of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. The snow roads and small, single-industry town scenes transitions into a sunrise over glimmering pack ice, where the silhouettes of four men traverse over a difficult morning terrain. “In a moment,” a narrator anticipates, “these peaceful sailors will turn into ferocious hunters.”72

The camera pans from these vast icebound waters down to a whitecoat seal pup, which vocalizes to an off-screen hunter. The pup seems to turn toward the hunter rather than

69 Rule, ibid, 741. 70 The film is shot in black and white. 71 After the collapse of the European seal fur market in 1982 and 1983, the Government of Canada—under the short- lived Prime Minister Frank Turner, replacing Pierre Eliot Trudeau earlier that summer who decided after a famous “walk in the snow” in February to step down—set up the Royal Commission on Seals and the Sealing Industry in Canada in 1984 with the mandate to “review all matters pertaining to seals and the sealing industry” (“Seals,” i). Of course, this seemingly simple mandate included questions like: “Under what conditions, if at all, is it acceptable for mankind to utilize or manipulate the seal populations for human benefits” (17). Ultimately the Report found that sealing posed “no significant risks to any stocks,” that there was “little cruelty or unnecessary suffering inflicted in most sealing operations” and that the perceived triviality of the seal fur masks the “critical issue [of] the importance of the income generated to those hunting seals” (24). The Report also links the “political climate” of the seal hunt back to the mid- 1960s, with Artek’s film. However, as George Wenzel pointed out, anti-seal hunt sentiment “was born” in 1955 “when several independent observers expressed the view that the hunt was cruel and ecologically dangerous” (Animal Rights, 46). Only with the image of the knife and the blood did the seal’s life emerge to the international public. See “Seals and sealing in Canada: Report of the Royal Commission, Volume 1,” Royal Commission on Seals and the Sealing Industry in Canada (Ottawa: Privy Council Office, 1986). 72 “Dans un instant, c'est paisible navigeuront se transformer en féroce chasse.” Les Grands Phoques de la banquise, dir. Serge Deyglun (Radio Canada: Artek Film, 1964), translation mine.

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away from him, no doubt to be read over and over again as its constitutive “helplessness” that will be repeated in all future campaigns to save it from the scene that follows.

Suddenly the pup is struck on the head and unceremoniously flipped over with the hakapik.73 A menacing music interrupts the silence of the scene. What follows is a familiar genesis to the seal hunt debate in Canada but also of many kinds of philosophical hauntings, before the anger and campaigns and philosophy takes on “a life of its own.”

The hunter hits the pup a few more times until, finally, he plunges a knife into its neck and drags it down to its flipper. The white fur is stained black, its body folded out flat against the ice. Only more of these scenes follow. In one infamous moment, a seal is poked with a knife several times, each time lunging toward its attacker, until pulled apart while alive. Here is the repetition in black and white that the #sealfie responds to: blood on ice, red on white.74 But of course, Angry Inuk, Tungijuq, and many sealfies show this scene in gorier details, in high definition and full colour. It is not uncommon to see the insides of the seal, to see its skin pulled away, to see its flesh eaten raw—in fact, it’s celebrated. So it may be proper to ask of this repetition: does the #sealfie respond to the blood or the knife? This is not an idle question. As ethnographers like Franz Boas75 and

73 The hakapik is a multi-purpose seal-hunting tool combining a club, a hammer for crushing the skull, and a hook to drag the body. Inuit, by contrast, would use rifles and harpoons (Wenzel, Animal, 147). 74 Rather, the imagination of red on white. In the film, of course, the seal spills a shade of grey. Though it is a powerful imagination, this shade, for Bataille was also captured, “haunted,” (Guilty, 38), “obsessed” (Tears, 206)—from the moment he saw until the end of his life—by the shade of a black and white photograph of Chinese lingchi. “The Chinese executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is busily cutting off his victim’s leg at the knee” (Guilty, 38, emphasis mine). He continues: “The blade’s entering the flesh at the knee. Who can accept,” he appears to ask, “that a horror of this magnitude would express ‘what you are’ and lay bare your nature?” (Guilty, 39). The purchase of this photo for Bataille is that it returns the magnitude of horror to the body and opens a communication between him and death. Instead of closing the horror behind art, as with Christian aesthetic, for Christianity turned its back on the “fundamental movement” of transgression (Death, 118), the photo reaches out toward Bataille in repetition that is not imitation. And more to the point, his photograph can’t decide between grimace and laughter, ecstasy or intolerability— which is to say, laugher and seduction. As this essay unfolds, both will return—but without losing imitation. See Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Walker and Company, 1961); Guilty, translated by Bruce Boone (Venice: The Lapis Press, 1981); The Tears of Eros, translated by Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989). 75 “She clung to the edge of the boat with a death grip. The cruel father then took a knife and cut off the first joints of her fingers. Falling into the sea they were transformed into whales, the nails turning into whalebone. Sedna holding on

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Knud Rasmussen76 recorded from Inuit all over the Nunangat in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and as Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten definitively show, the origin of seals begins with the knife.77 Not only the knife, but the knife on bone, of a cruelty—the severing of human fingers.78 Only with the knife comes the seal.79

Baby, Seal

to the boat more tightly, the second finger joints fell under the sharp knife and swam away as seals (Pagomys fœtidus); when the father cut off the stumps of the fingers they became ground seals (Phoca barbata).” Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo: Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1884-1885 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1888), 584. 76 “But the girl clung to the side of the boat, and as she would not let go, her father hacked off the top joints of her fingers, and the finger tips fell into the sea, and seals came bobbing up all round the boat. Her finger tips became seals.” Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Hudson Bay Eskimos: Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-1924 (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1929), 65. 77 Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, “The Seal, the Offspring of the Sea Woman,” in Hunters, Predators and Prey: Inuit Perceptions of Animals (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 265-307. 78 This is known throughout at the Arctic as the story of the “sea woman,” Takánâluk Arnâluk, “known to southern art collectors as Sedna” (Qitsualik, “Hag”). She is also called Nuliajuk or Niviaqsi (Qitsualik, “Problem”). See Laugrand and Oosten (2015) for an excellent overview. See also Rachel Attituq Qitsualik, “The Problem With Sedna: Part One of Three,” Nunatsiaq, 5 March 1999; Qitsualik, “Hag: Part One of Two,” Nunatsiaq, 10 December 1999. For a reading that responds to the feminist critiques of violence against women in Inuit stories like this one, see Keavy Martin, “Rescuing Sedna: Doorslamming, Fingerslicing, and the Moral of the Story,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 38, no. 2 (2011), 186-200. I am deliberately not repeating the story of “Sedna” in detail here, whether through her anger or withholdings. It is of course tempting to read the #sealfie campaign, or Inuit anger about the seal hunt, in light of this story. But I don’t, for two reasons. First, this story and its details and its meanings and its contexts “stalk” the sealfie—an image “never stands alone,” so thought Deleuze (Negotiations, 51). To insert the image into this stalking means hunting a hunt that makes me hunted, and so a very recognizable rhetorical “shattering” laughter that returns recognition. Second, to do so trails an origin on the path toward immanence, as “the anticipation of an/other future, an/other way of being-with-one-another-in-the-world” (Breaking Up, 15). To echo Davis, already echoing Derrida, this is where Arctic rhetoric will have been. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 79 In several different registers. Brian Davies named Les Phoques the “turning point” of the “unbelievable savagery and bloodiness of the hunt” (Davies, Savage, 101). Davies is mentioned by name less often in stories about the seal bans, but he plays a central role in its history. Beginning with the New Brunswick Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals between 1961 and 1969, he was instrumental, beginning in 1966, in shifting organizational focus to animal rights causes like the seal hunt, which led to the “Save the Seals” fund. In 1969, the NB SPCA ended its seal campaign and Davies used the money from the “Save the Seals” fund to create the International Fund for Animal Welfare that, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, was instrumental to the anti-seal debate. As Brigitte Bardot told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1978: “I adore Brian Davies because he takes care of the baby seals” (Fifth Estate, 1978). Less often is it mentioned that Davies’ campaign toward the abolition of the hunt begins with an imitation. “I, the undersigned, Gustave A. Poirier,” one of the hunters hired by the Artek, “declare having been employed by a group of photographers … to skin a large seal for a film. I solemnly swear that I was asked to torment the said seal”. Davies will call this a “faked film smear” that would “bedevil” his work (ibid, 101-102). This essay is no place to tell the whole story, no less because it’s been done before. For an excellent overview, see Alan Herscovici, Second Nature: The Animal Rights Controversy (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1991). See also Brian Davies, Savage Luxury: The Slaughter of the Baby Seals (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1970); The Fifth Estate, “Pro-Seal Hunt Media Campaign Escalates,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 7 March 1978.

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While various images of Inuit wearing fur online are largely rendered legible within the authorized markets of a “time immemorial” cultural practice separated from the protective services and discourses surrounding the commercial seal hunt, Tanya Tagaq’s

#sealfie framed the living body and the dead body in an unacceptable rhetorical relation.

The backlash to her photo, depicting her child juxtaposed against the body of the seal laying beside it, delimited the relationality: life and its expressions and enunciations could not be framed with death and dead bodies—for the blood on the rocks and on the tip of the knife was always the first imitation. As just one respondent of many on Twitter challenged, “If they [Inuit, Tagaq] have the mentality 2 [sic] murder a seal like that, they could easily murder humans.”80 Similar responses called for her child to be placed “into care,” that Tagaq “obviously isn’t a fit mother,” that she’s “inbred,” and “sick.”81 Others edited bloody meat onto Tagaq’s face, and represented her child similarly, imitating the skinning of the seal onto the hunted, and ostensibly erasing the ontological border between them in the name of life, which is to say only in the name of the knife.

The legibility of Tagaq’s photograph imitates in part Les Phoques, where the circulation of the body, the hunt itself, or the Inuit claim to it, dwells inside the living body. If the blood of the seal runs onto the rocks, if its fur remains on its dead body, the life of the child stands in too stark and perhaps even an impossible contrast. Tagaq is therefore variously rendered a killer, an old agent of death, and an unfit care provider for her child. But these responses, though they caught Arnaquq-Baril and Tagaq off-guard, were repetitions of the animal rights rhetorics. The problem is that the untranslatability of the dead seal was already illegible in advance, whether as an act of unsanctioned killing

80 Bean, “Sealfies.” 81 Ibid.

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by a murder, or in the finitude we all share. That is: whether because the body of the seal has not been protected from death, and so its life has been extinguished, or because Inuit tradition, cosmology, or rhetorical relations with the body of the seal, its blood, its fur, the ulu knife in wait, are all moved to the future as a sharing we all found ourselves waiting for. As such, the body of the seal can stand only as an imitation for the knife—that cuts along the line, spilling ontological borders or imitative immanence. And it is precisely the kind of cut that produces silence through the “socially acceptable” and “sustainable” seal hunt by Inuit. But what links this cut to the statistically “expected” suicides in the settlement,82 the housing shortage, the claims and protests of community meetings against unwanted development, are still matters, perhaps, before the law.

Rachel A. Qitsualik-Tinsley once addressed the relationship between Inuit and the hunt. The modern English word for hunt, she reminds us, derived from Old English huntian, has its root in chase and pursuit. Such is the romanticized image of the Inuit hunter stalking prey in the white expanse as a grand metaphor of survival. But in

Inuktitut, “the word for hunting is ‘aquijuq,’ which is ‘to go get.’ Aquijuq can also mean to retrieve some meat from a cache.”83 As Qitsualik-Tinsley defined it, this retrieval, getting what one needs and finding it again and again, is “what constitutes the Inuit world.” Indigenous peoples all throughout the world have continued making this point. It is not, precisely not, the survival of the pursuit, but the reaching for and revealing of what makes Inuit. “It is for this reason that,” Qitsualik-Tinsley continued, “to Inuit, hunting and killing are two completely different concepts. Inuit have never hunted an animal with

82 See Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 81-82. 83 Rachel A. Qitsualik, “Getting and Hunting,” Nunatsiaq, 16 July 1998.

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the intent of killing it, but rather of getting what they need of it.”84 Tagaq’s sealfie seems to have a secret: the body of the seal always moves, always survives, except when located in the rhetorical stage of encounter that is the hunt as retrieval. This retrieval (of Inuit hunting) is not, as Derrida needed it to be, the imitation of sacrifice.85 It is, rather, relation as Inuit. As Qitsualik-Tinsley has argued, Inuit is sovereignty.86 But this is what the

#sealfie also hides: Tagaq is not only an agent of death in the media’s circulatory system, but one of survivance. This is because the discursive and rhetorical framings of life and death of the body of the seal are silenced by a depthless finitude—the founding imitation that “we” are.87 And so if the imprint of life in the body of the protected seal is understood simply within the narratives of a protected resource, the cultural allowance of seal skin trade accommodations or, as Athens has argued, the attempts at a reclamation of cultural representation in shared online space, the body of the seal is kept in pursuit, in following, its survivance. This revealing, the matter of both Inuit and non-human animals, people and food, is what makes the world. The “going to get,” in other words, the act of retrieval as hunt—and the sharing practices, knowledge-making, and stories that constitute this retrieval of Inuit—founds the claim that Inuit have reiterated for generations worth of struggles. In the afterlives of food, however, the dead body of the

84 Ibid. 85 “What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? … In what respect is the question, if you will, carnivorous? The infinitely metonymical question on the subject of ‘one must eat well’ must be nourishing not only for me, for a self, which, given its limits, would thus eat badly, it must be shared … and not only in language. ‘One must eat well’ does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the- other-to-eat.” He continues: “The putting to death of the animal” is, according to a sacrificial structure of which we all partake “of the other,” can only be “eating well” if it isn’t linked to the “violent institution of the ‘who’,” for which it so often is. Derrida, “Eating Well,” 115. 86 I’ve expanded on this elsewhere, but see for example: Rachel A. Qitsualik, “Innumarik: Self-Sovereignty in Classic Inuit Thought,” in Nilliajut: Inuit Perspectives on Security, Patriotism, and Sovereignty (Ottawa: Inuit Tapariit Kanatami, 2013), 23-34. 87 And yet this is not the same thing as saying that there must be a reopening of the ontological limit. Rather, it is that this limit is already occurring in the future of the line.

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seal is only permissible in this sense as an exception in the future of time immemorial that we all share. This is the imitation that the #sealfie first encountered.

Knife, Cut

And so: the seal(fie) also is “splitting” along the line. The line is what is distinct from the border.88 As Wolfe has argued, it is not about an inside and outside distinction—in the way that Muckelbauer doesn’t oppose difference to repetition or the copy to the model— so much as it is about “what is proper,” which is to say the “rules and laws” that attend to sovereignty, to being, to self.89 Elsewhere Wolfe has convincingly written on what philosophies that seek to do away with speciesism or anthropos encounter in “the challenge of sharing the planet with non-human subjects.”90 The starting point for these animal (rights) philosophies tends to be “our shared embodiment, mortality, and finitude.”91 But this is where posthumanist rhetorics encounter what Wolfe has called the

“second kind of finitude,”92 or “double finitude.”93 Consider the way that death, for

Derrida, is the impossible-for-us that makes death for-the-other—but, at once, because the other cannot have death (in-itself “for” them) either, this beckons the infinite call of finitude (the other).94 This not-having-“for” follows what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “being-

88 Certainly this claim feels more ironic in every year reporting more taiga wildfires, animal migrations, melting ice, and “opportunities” for the Arctic “opening.” But I leave this line here. 89 Wolfe, Before, 10. 90 Cary Wolfe, “Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post) Humanist Philosophy,” SubStance 37, no. 3 (2008), 8- 36. 91 Ibid, 8. 92 Ibid, 26. 93 Wolfe, Before, 80. 94 For an excellent reading of Derridean espacement, the inhabitation of time and space and space in time, or otherwise the architecture or structure of the trace as a non-chronological “succession,” a constitutive deferral or the “arche- materiality of time,” see Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). I could not possibly hope, at this point, to engage meaningfully with Hägglund’s reading of time, though I have given many indications of it in Wolfe, Davis, and Muckelbauer. The important point here is that finitude is (in) survival (sur-vivance), the “minimal condition for life to resist death” (ibid, 1) that cannot transcend the

147 in-common,” an immanent subsistence95 such that being is “in” common “with” one another,96 an “in” whose limit “is nothing: it is nothing but this extreme abandonment in which all property, all singular instance of property, in order to be what it is, is first of all given over to the outside (but not to the outside of an inside…).”97 For Davis this is of course a finitude, not merely as a limit that life crashes up against, but which is the

“infinity of loose ends, a fluidity that will not have been under our control.”98 In other words, this second finitude is what grants the sense of an embodied vulnerability (a limit) as an unavailability “in” the “not being able” (a line). This not-having is what we share,

“in common,” in advance, and what enables the movement from a human/for-us to a radically extensive dislocation of life and death.

According to Michel Foucault,99 the epistemic shifts that elicit the emergence of biology, economy, and philology are also the emergence of what, for rhetoric, be-comes undone—Man, rhetoric, the sovereign: such a being reckoning with interiority, the vertical architectures of non-representational relations between words and things.

Foucault argues that it’s in this shift that the imagination of Man as a relational and existent being within this architecture is revealed. Man, in other words, makes these things, and in this making reckons with itself as a being that is a part of its analytic movements—if not the centre, then certainly the extremity of an articulation of its

future that is the condition of its constitutive being-unable. Survival, finitude, is a never-present-to-it-self by virtue of being survival. This is what Wolfe calls the second finitude: survival is already its non-presence to it-self, and, at once, its in-ability to transcend the bounds of the finitude that exceeds it. And so any promise “does not promise fulfillment … the promise does not promise a future that will be present in itself … Whatever it promises, it promises the coming of a future that in its turn will have the structure of a promise” (ibid, 137). 95 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being-In-Common,” in Community At Loose Ends, edited by Miami Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 3. 96 Ibid, 6. 97 Ibid, 8. 98 Davis, Breaking Up, 185. 99 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), especially 303-343.

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chronology or story. But what also happens here is that Man is revealed, despite the feeling or being or metaphysics of a long-since-being, or a transcendental-forever-being, as preceded by the things he looks at. Or in Derrida’s words, Man is made of what it follows.100 In making them, in being made of them, and in being derived from the

“conditions of possibility”101 that limit and delimit them, what Man discovers is the infinite opening derived by the non-representational relation between. Finitude is distinguished by this radical opening of the architecture of things—the too-long before and too-long after, with Man adrift. Going nowhere, the endpoint of Man’s existence ends-up somewhere in the plane of being.102 What changes is not simply the emergence of Man but a different finitude, existent in different proximity to the thing called the infinite.103 Rather than a relation to the eternal, the always-was, what occurs instead is

“ongoing” such that Man and things don’t necessarily align over the long-time of the finite set that is called this new “finitude.” The emergence of this finitude, constituted by the existence of biology and economy and language, is the necessity of seeing Man as differently constituted by and from this finitude.

Man: a mirror of the enslaved sovereign, an imitation of infinity. Now finitude does not designate any longer an “end.”104 Rather, it opens to an infinite set of infinitely rendered finitudes. It is, rather, a space-time that exponentially moves not toward the limits of the finite but rather the lines of its expression, of what the finite enables

100 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 101 Foucault, Things, 243. 102 Ibid, 354. 103 Ibid, 316-17. 104 Ibid, 384-85.

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representationally for life, for security, for biology, for economy, for future.105 If finitude emerges differently in relation to the infinite, it does so in its own analysis as well, precisely because the finite requires, and carries within it, the problem of its infinite set.

Ergo finitude can’t simply come to represent the beginning and end of things, but only the problem as an infinite regress, of beginnings and ends.106 Its “line” is found to have been rhetorical in advance, as a finite trajectory plotted physically, biologically, ecologically of the infinite—enabled, having enabled the granting of the is-not that does not end or begin, the what cannot-be-added-or-subtracted from. It is this finitude that answers to the body of the seal, in advance, as a sharing-in-relation.

Implicitly threaded through this in-relation is the shared vulnerabilities of finitude that vouchsafe apologies and the vulnerability together: the end of the world, the end of the Arctic. The question comes to the name and being-named in the being/s of food that are writ into the discursive and non-discursive lifetimes of world that respond to the violence of capital and climate. “After all,” asks Wolfe, “why eat animals at all?”107 The question is built not only in the line wherein the decision-making is a making-of-decision, but whence issues being-and-relation in the passage of life and death. Qitsualik-Tinsley seems to respond here in anticipation: “So many non-Inuit, since so long ago, seem instead to want to tell Inuit what they are, rather than letting Inuit tell of themselves. Does it take so much to simply let people be?”108

105 Ibid, 332. 106 Ibid, 335. 107 But let me be very clear on this account. I am not charging Wolfe with misunderstanding. In the context of the law and systems theory, in which he is making his argument about animality as a legal subject, Wolfe understands very well that the autoimmunitary and autopoietic condition of the law, as he understands it, means that what is before the law (as a subject, prior-to and apprehended-by) is a function of what is after the law (as an object, preceding and supervening). This is what Wolfe has called the law’s “openness from closure” that, like the Derridean trace, the “inescapable self- referential closure of law is precisely, in its contingency, what opens it to the future and the outside” (Before, 92). 108 Rachel Attituq Qitsualik, “Let People Be,” Nunatsiaq, 4 February 1999.

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The cuts reach, appear to reach, beyond the infinite extent of the “name of what is,” but always-is-before, the “more than,”109 into the “afterlife” of food. This is the first imitation that links to the more-than-human of rhetoricity its futures, where they grant, not simply the denial of the uncaptured (or noncapturable) idea called universal hospitality, but a sovereignty that asked Inuit long ago: Do you not yet know that you will not have been in advance? And do rhetorical materialisms, rhetorical ecologies, and posthuman rhetorics not pose this very question to “us” today?

Coût, Cout-eau110

Reportage on the #sealfie campaign noted its humour (as a link to its politics).111 What’s funny to rhetoric? Davis responds with a “shattering” laughter. Categories, boundaries, selves, notions, meanings, presences: “A laughter that shatters would laugh with the

‘sweep’ … an affirmative laughter, arising from the overflow, the excess, and capable of momentarily and instantaneously catapulting us out of negative dialectics by negating negation itself.”112 To this end, it is laughter that shatters the myth that links the individual to the community: “Any assumption of a ‘social essence’ functions to deny both the infinite finitude the unprecedented multiplicity of singular beings and the radical

109 Wolfe, Before, 98. 110 In French, coût translates to “price,” or “cost.” Couteau translates to “knife,” and eau to “water.” 111 Arnaquq-Baril made two points on this account in a March 2014 blog post on her website Unikkaat: “The subject [of the seal ban] is very relevant to the documentary film I am working on at the moment, called Angry Inuk. It’s called “Angry” to be ironic, because of how Inuit have a tendency to be calm and respectful even when we’re really mad or upset about something … Another idea that my hilarious friend Laakkuluk Williamson came up with: post a picture of yourself wearing sealskin and send it to her by twitter with the hashtag #sealfie in reference to her famous and heavily retweeted #selfie.” Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, “#sealfie vs. #selfie,” Unikkaat, 26 March 2014, accessed at http://www.unikkaat.com/sealfie-vs-selfie/. 112 Davis, Breaking Up, 2-3. Westerners, she continues, have a tendency not to laugh, to want not to crack up, to fear fluidity. As it happens, Davis seeks what Blanchot and Bataille did: “a nocturnal emission,” a communication that doesn’t avow itself (4). And so: a shade (sans imitation)? This is what, in this text, Davis calls “writing toward futurity” (5). And while I don’t charge Davis as staying with this language, the (rhetorical) laughter she describes is a “serum” and a brutal “transfusion” that will “infuse” rhetoric—too within the lines—with a shattering laughter (9).

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differences among those singular beings.”113 Whether the sealfie or the self, life or death, split or splitting, Inuit wait in the future to be sanctioned as a time immemorial model of this immanent movement, given a privileged access to death only insofar as it de- and re- constitutes finitude as a matter of the law, on the one hand, and without sovereignty, on the other. This rhetoric of the body is not only a matter of discipline. As a sharing-in- relation, its dynamics become-circulated into the discursive afterlife—the end of the

Arctic might always just as well take the name “finitude,” for it is always its imitation, determining what can be seen “in the first place”—as a form of censorship and disavowal, exception, and of sharing.

As Davis points out, every reading is already a misreading.114 But not all misreadings are the same, and in this way lead to a kind of misreading in bad faith as dismissal. The dismissal is carried in this misreading toward a misreading of a kind. If we are to mis-read-rightly, she argues, it is to lead us to where politics and race and identity are erased entirely, where the Self—we can (why not?) replace this word with

Sovereign—is risked. And so: “we-readers will have to be willing to venture into a text unshielded,” noting of course in advance that this text is the text of which we all already are, infinitely in advance, “to dive in alone, to sever our link to the already-known, to the already-written. One has to risk one’s Self, let everything go. Without this risk, one goes

113 Ibid, 13. Rhetoric is not alone in asking whether, as Reed Ray Dasenbrock once put it, “the entire world can and should be read through lenses polished in Paris.” To that end, it isn’t (will not have been) controversial to say that rhetorical laughter, as the break (of) humanism, refracts a lot of light from the Seine. But for Arctic rhetoric, this break is given as a laughter that “has the guts to attend to the exscribed, to respond to its call, for the sake of the community that the illusion of common-being conceals” (Breaking Up, 14). See Dasenbrock, “Becoming Aware of the Myth of Presence,” Journal of Advanced Composition 8, nos. 1/2 (1988), 1. 114 Davis, Breaking Up, 255. Echoes: I have argued elsewhere that mis/reading was a necessary methodology to emerge a particular mode of worldly rhetoricity in its relation to sovereignty. Yet I have premised this misreading not on “reading,” as Davis has argued of text in general. In other words, my mis/reading is not a figure of the origin (the lack). If this were the case, I would return, in advance, to find the knife waiting. But my mis/reading was given by a mistranslation—of which sovereignty, recalling Derrida, always is—that was suggestive of rhythmicity. This rhythmicity, I argued, was the granting that shares “of” contemporary rhetoricity and sovereignty, that which must return. This sharing, which we have encountered again and again, is the constitutive rhetoricity of Arctic rhetoric.

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nowhere.”115 To read, like to write, is to risk all of this in advance. But to recall Martin,116 what might need to be risked is the idea that some lines just don’t split above the tree-line.

At the same time that this risk means complexities like appropriation, could it also mean this risk, to risk the “No”? Or perhaps it is more complicated. What if the “we-readers” in fact should take this advice to “dive in alone,” unshielded and severed? Perhaps in doing so, the risk becomes of doing this above the tree-line, and thereby to imitate the abandoned abandonment. “Without risk, one goes nowhere.” So: a nomadic risk. The

#sealfie, it would seem, is also funny because this risk (re-)encounters nomadic peoplehood and still finds that all is broken up in advance. But I suspect, I can only suspect, this is the kind of joke Inuit know already—and recall. Perhaps, then, I can risk this claim, finally: the body of the seal is not the imitation of the knife.

115 Davis, Breaking Up, 257. 116 Martin, Stories, 8.

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Chapter 3: printf(“Inuit”);

The “unconditional duty of negotiation,” Derrida once told Stiegler: de laisser de l’avenir

à l’avenir.1 In a different interview,2 Derrida says of negotiation: “Whether one wants it or not, one is always working in the mobility between several positions, stations, places, between which a shuttle is needed.”3 The unconditional duty of negotiation, (in) the

“impossibility of establishing oneself anywhere,”4 (in) this “essential aspect” that it is

“always different, differential … at every moment, from one context to the next.”5

Negotiation, to this end, says Derrida, “is at work in every word.”6 Diane Davis, answering to the question of what rhetoric leaves out, suggested that perhaps rhetorical theory begins within the “confines of what is called rhetoric.” If it begins in there,

1 Translated: “to let [laisser] the future have a future.” Derrida continues the possible translation: “to let or make it come, or, in any case, to leave the possibility of the future open. And, to this end, to negotiate between rhythms so that, at least, this opening will not be saturated.” I let this stand here, as it will be, suggestively, making-itself-known throughout this essay. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, translated by Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 85, emphasis mine. 2 I have chosen two interviews—and I will work with many other interviews in the coming pages—to address negotiation and future, in particular, because they link analogically to matters of concern in this essay and elsewhere. As Derrida goes on to say, “what is important in an interview such as this one is that I say things precisely in a way that is the least calculated possible, naked” (ibid, 20, emphasis mine). Derrida was also famously à poil to his cat, “in front of the insistent gaze of the animal” (Animal, 4), what he renders “this thing” “that is called” nudity (ibid, emphasis mine). The shame and fear excavated from this cat, the shame of feeling shame, is a well-trodden path. But I return to it now to ask whether this nudity, “in front of” the cat, is analogical to that nudity, “the least calculated as possible” in the interview. Nakedness emerges as a question in both cases, I think, in this sense: “of being as naked as a beast” (ibid, emphasis mine). Two parts to this sense: the omission of the word “ashamed,” by me, to stress the preposition “of,” of- being-as, and as an imperfect translation. Rather, it is in this sense as an imperfect translation, for the translation, “beast” gestures to the “sovereignly” untranslatable word, as Derrida brings out in his lectures on sovereignty, the word bête. In the least calculated possible way of speaking one threatens bête, as one does naked in front of the cat, threatening to be naked without knowing nakedness (5). The analogy of this and that nakedness, then, echoes the translation, possession, representation, and sovereignty […]. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited and translated by Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 3 Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, edited and translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 12, emphasis mine. 4 Ibid. Even where there is a kind of Kantian non-negotiable, categorical, imperative, we must nonetheless negotiate “between” the nonnegotiable in negotiation (13). 5 Ibid, 17. 6 […] in every word. Ibid, 24.

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thinking through something, claiming something, leaving something out, the work of rhetoric “may end up crashing through the gates, which may be recognizable as gates.”7

“It is a mistake,” Deleuze once wrote, “to think that the painter works on a white surface.”8 The images of the canvas are already there, what he called données, givens, or rather the fact of “figurative givens,” there “before the painter’s work begins.”9 In fact, they are there, and must be there, lest the painter find themselves the Architect of models from which copies follow. But this finding is not to be—a lesson that rhetoric, too, would mournfully and excitedly claim of the rhetor10—for the white surface is precisely not empty in advance.11 The canvas waits before the future, full of the figurative, the cliché,

7 Bradford Vivian and Diane Davis, “Fragments from ‘Rhetorical Theory: Questions, Provocations, Futures’,” Rhetoric Across Borders, edited by Anne Teresa Demo (Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2015), 284. Davis continues: “What I’m trying to suggest is that one of theory’s fundamental qualities … is something Derrida called ‘destinerrance,’ which tries to name a kind of destiny of errant circulation, a destiny of wandering without the promise of return. For theory,” though it’s difficult to dissociate this name from the name “rhetoric,” “to be what it is, it must have room to wander, to follow its leads wherever they take it” (285). To never settle, to be at work in every word, is the “hope and the challenge” for contemporary rhetorical theory. As Thomas Rickert recently put it in the context of a recent collection on circulation studies—a “threshold concept” of movement, circularity, flows, and networks (Gries, 11-12)— “Rhetorical study is always on the go” (“Circulation,” 300) insofar as rhetoric is enworlded in the material. Being on the go, then, participates in a wider rhetorical ontology of circulation, such that the circulatory “momentum” is caught up in a “dynamic interchange” with rhetoric (300-301). “The gates” of rhetoric, the canvas or the contour, therefore signals both to the movement that rhetoricity is, and the identificatory givens that it must move through so as to recognize remainders, the violence of definitional knowledge. Rhetoric is in and as movement, and in such an emergence loses the mythico-stability of the origin. In this loss rhetoric may re-claim. See Laurie E. Gries, “Introduction: Circulation as an Emergent Threshold Concept,” Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2018), 3-26; Thomas Rickert, “Circulation- Signification-Ontology,” Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2018), 300-307. 8 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 71. 9 Ibid. 10 As I have explored elsewhere, and what is the implicit given of this essay, this is perhaps one of the key claims of what Diane Davis has once called rhetoric “at the end of the world,” which I take to include material rhetoric, ambient rhetoric, ecological rhetoric, circulation rhetoric, and other modes of (new, materialist, post-human) rhetoric without the sovereign. See for example: Diane Davis, Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); “Rhetoricity at the End of the World,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017), 431-451. Also see Debra Hawhee, “Kairotic Encounters,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, edited by Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002); McGreavy et al., Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life: Ecological Approaches, edited by Bridie McGreavy et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: University of New York Press, 1997); Bradford Vivian, Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation (Albany: University of New York Press, 2004). 11 There are echoes here, that have been building, to “the early” Heidegger’s question of temporality. Certainly Heidegger’s foothold in contemporary rhetoric is secure to the point of being cliché. But when I write that there is an

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the “ready-made perceptions, memories, phantasms.”12 The “canvas,” then, is already analogical—for perhaps the analogy is what waited before the white of the canvas13—in the world, and necessarily in the context of this writing.14 The white of the canvas is full of “equal and unequal” probabilities, and it’s only when “the unequal probability becomes a certitude”—that is to say, when the painter has an idea of what to do with the canvas, a “knowing” that is in part the “pictoral idea” that helps fill the canvas in advance—that painting begins. The question now, for Deleuze, is one of invention. If the canvas stands to me, is me, there, already full of clichés, phantasms, and memories; if the canvas has me, for me, in advance, whence invention?15 Deleuze’s response is familiar: the painter must not oppose, but rather move into the canvas. Put another way, the painter, such as they are, is (in) the inhabitation of inhabitation: the painter “will only get there,” to this end, “by getting out of the canvas.”16 But a threat pervades this coming into what

in-advance to what is not itself a “pure and empty” form, this might, perhaps it ought to, call to mind Dasein’s ownmost possibility (Time, 162) in being-towards-death. For Heidegger, authentically becoming one’s ownmost possibility (of death) is given in the anticipation that is the very revealing of this possibility (306). In other words, Dasein’s becoming is in its becoming of its ownmost possibility, is as the facticity of the given, in the future—the “in advance” (309). This is Dasein’s temporality, the temporalization of temporality that is the becoming of Time, a being given in-advance wherein “Dasein brings itself back 'immediately'—that is to say, in a way that is temporally ecstatical—to what already has been before it” (443). And so, to submit Heidegger to the brutality of a petty summary: the temporalization of temporality is the in-advance toward Time, that which is (without being) what was always “before it,” waiting in the future of Dasein authentically becoming its ownmost possibility. At this very moment I abandon this thinking of temporality and Time, I abandon this claim to possibility, and I name this relation of empty-in-advance to Vorhabe (what we have in advance, fore-conception, or fore-having) (191) because, like the canvas, it has been named in the granting of the passage. To this I will (must) return. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1985). 12 Deleuze, Sensation, 71. 13 This is the claim I make for this paper, but here dressed in a different skin. Meanwhile, Deleuze’s answer is complicated. The figurative givens of the canvas are what he calls “ways of seeing,” and these ways of seeing are “illustrative and narrative reproductions or representations” (Sensation, 74). That is to say, it is what is in and of the canvas before the painting where “by convention,” through representation, “or through analogy or through a code” (ibid). As Deleuze clarifies, these “ways of seeing” or not only ways of seeing, but the seen—that is, figuration and its bare repetition, the reproduction of representation that is central to the project of Difference and Repetition—“is what is seen, until finally one sees nothing else” (ibid). Representation is the risk of the analogy of repetition, the “with every moment of every painting” (79) that can’t help but be repeated in its facticity. Part of Deleuze’s goal has been not to exit from this figuration, but to affirmatively mutate it, to “reject” it through disfigurement and deformity (76). I will return to Deleuze’s theory of analogy in this text. 14 Today is the canvas not the source-code editor and integrated development environment (IDE)? 15 Deleuze, Sensation, 76. 16 Deleuze is quite clear on this point. The problem isn’t getting into the canvas, because the painter was already there, but rather of getting out of the canvas. Yet, the first problem is to reckon the representation, the cliché, the analogy so

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we were always already present to, and this is what Deleuze names code. The painter, confronted with the white of the canvas, given with the pictoral image of where they want to end up presencing the entrance of the canvas and the possibility for invention (exit) from it, thereby builds the diagram, the movement of the “operative set of traits,”17 and in doing so thereby opens a “violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens” as “the germ” of rhythm.18 The building of the diagram struggles to build the “traits of sensation,” to free the hand from the digits, to “break up the sovereign optical organization” in the forming of the “nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative.”19 Yet this is not mere abstraction, this is more than not-having-in-mind while beginning, for pure abstraction merely replaces the diagram with the code by settling into opposition. The canvas has-in- mind, and thus the diagram’s opening must come into confrontation with what undoes: with rhythm, the sharing-in-relation.20 The code is digital, “in the sense of the finger that counts,” digits, the “units that group together … the terms of opposition.”21 But the

as to pass into the canvas (ibid, 78). While Deleuze will pursue this line of thought through what he calls the “manipulated chance” (77), the making of accidental marks that are, in some sense, prepictoral—an argument that resonates with the contemporary pre-rhetorical givens of world—so as to “extract the improbable … from the set of figurative probabilities” (ibid), I will not be tracing this path. However, as I will briefly show, there are analogous claims being made in different mediums and medias given the course of contemporary identity. 17 The operative set of traits and “color-patches,” and “of lines and zones” (ibid, 83). 18 Ibid, 83. Rhythm is the germ in relation to the “new order of the painting,” insofar as this opens up the realm of sensation, the “existential communication” of rhythm as the “ground of the senses” (39). Rhythm for Deleuze in the context of this book is the “vital power” of vibration, which shivers across the layers of figuration and representation, of chaos and catastrophe, working through the “violent movements” of the real beyond representation (40-41). Sensation moves through the body and “mixes” with the painting, introducing everything from time to the “phenomena of precipitation and anticipation” (43). Rhythm is what names the sovereignless ground of what pulses “beneath representation, beyond representation” (ibid) as the condition of what Deleuze calls Force (48). If the painter escapes the canvas, it is to the release of Force in the “struggle against the shadow” of the same (52). 19 Ibid, 82. 20 As I have argued elsewhere, sharing-in-relation is the practice of moving relation to the future, where the “capacity” for invention, response, or difference becomes responsiveness given before identity. Sharing-in-relation may take the name “rhythm,” as it does for Deleuze and John Muckelbauer, and many others, but I have named it the enablement of granting—invitation, opening, break, secretion, chaos, finitude. See Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 21 Deleuze, Sensation, 84. Deleuze pairs so-called abstract painting with the code, as to what “answers” to painting at the time of his writing: “what can save man from ‘the ‘abyss,’ from external tumult and manual chaos? … Restore to man a pure and optical space” (85). For Deleuze, through which the hand mixes with the vital force of rhythm in the passage out of representation, code reduces the hand to the finger—the finger that pushes, that points, that counts (ibid). The abstract expressionist painter thereby “internalizes” the “tension in the optical form” and renders the entire painting

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painter is in the canvas and produces the diagram toward exit in the painting. What was there already in the canvas, as representation and figuration, persists—and so the passage from the canvas is in invention as the materialization of the opening, or, following

Muckelbauer, the intensive singular rhythm.22 This is made possible through a constitutive prevention: in the retention of the “contour” of facticity,23 and of code. In the white of the canvas, the diagram is the production, what is built, but its making is given by the passage of the prevention that waited for they who built it. Thus, the passage of the canvas is through code, the “internalized manual movement” of re-production, of oppositions, similarities, resemblances. The diagram is the entrance into what already was there, to preserve facticity, what prevents and what remains as a given prevention, to invent beyond, which is to say prior to, code. The “result” of the diagram will emerge from the mixing or “intertwining” of the “frame” (the contour of facticity) and the sensation (the worldly communication of rhythm). It is at this crucial moment that we approach the question of analogy.24

the diagram and never passing out from the canvas, while the “Action” painter, like Pollock, moves toward sensation but “remains in an irredeemably confused state” (89). 22 Muckelbauer has spoken extensively (and indirectly) on this topic. Intensivity names the immanent and particular inhabitance of encounter, granted by what Muckelbauer calls the “common” (Future, 160), or what I have named sharing-in-relation. 23 Deleuze, Sensation, 89. 24 I pause here to recognize a significant question posed by Erik Doxtader (2017): “At what cost does … possession come?” (466). In search of difference-in-itself, Deleuze recounts that Aristotle distinguishes difference “only in relation to the supposed identity of a concept,” what he calls the generic concept, and which, furthermore, “goes so far as opposition, that is pushed as far as contrariety” (Difference, 31). Here he is, of course, contrasting Aristotelian difference from the universal, Platonic Idea, so that it is only in the “particular moment” wherein difference is reconciled “with the concept in general.” Thus Aristotle’s “diaphora of the diaphora,” Deleuze concludes, “is only a false transport” because the “changing nature” of difference is never given except as a “point of accommodation” for an “entirely relative maxim” (32). Diaphora (also called differentia) is classificatory relation of predicate to subject, a tracking of eidos, and, in Aristotle’s terms, the method distinguishing differentia from genus. Take for example the unity of definition problem (1037b10) in Metaphysics Z, wherein Aristotle asks how we get definitions that point to one rather than many things (i.e., trying to distinguish the circle from the triangle only with lines and continuity [1037b10] will not provide “what sort of parts are parts of the form, and what sort of parts are parts of the whole taken together” [1037a36-37]). As definition is a “unitary formula” (1037b25), Aristotle begins with genus (1037b21) and divides by taking “the differentia of the differentia” (1038a9) until, along this progenic chain, “if each new differentia is a differentia of the previous one, there will be one last differentia and it will be the form and the substance” (1038a25-26). And so: Deleuze’s “false transport,” where differentiae don’t differentiate. The movement that tracks through division the identity of concepts through differentiation is significant for Deleuze, for it marks what he calls a “propitious

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But it is at this moment that I interrupt, to return to the analogy, with two Arctic dreams.25 Lisa Stevenson tells the story of a dream26 from a young girl in Iqaluit,27

Monica, whose best friend, Annie, killed herself. In her dream Monica sits across from moment” that was “disastrous” for the “entire philosophy” of difference—becoming “no more than a predicate in the comprehension of the concept.” Deleuze goes on to say that for Aristotle, “specific difference is maximal and perfect, but only on the condition of the identity of an undetermined concept (genus).” Difference, cut by the specific and generic, becomes the split of dual Logoi: the “logos of Species, the logos of what we think and say, which rests upon the condition of identity or univocity of concepts in general taken as genera; and the logos of Genera, the logos of what is thought and said through us, which is free of that condition and operates both as the equivocity of Being and in the diversity of the most general concepts” (32-33). Difference, split and subordinated to the relation of species and genera (as Being), is rendered “distributive and hierarchical,” and therefore “is not collective … has no content in itself” and becomes only an equivocal “content in proportion to the formally different terms of which it is predicated” (33). Identity, reflexively waiting to submit differentiation as its final destination, constitutes itself as an internal relation of the Aristotelian category. Aristotle’s difference moves in dual “passages,” one from similarity to identity and another “from respectively identical genera to the relations of analogy which obtain between them in the intelligible” (34). Thus, here are extracted two crucial glimmers in the negative horizon of Deleuzean difference: the passage and the analogy. And so, to return to Doxtader’s question: “At what cost does … possession come?” I have edited out the word “this,” of “this possession” of zōon logon ekhon, because the question echoes, as Doxtader knows, well beyond the composition of what rests with “this.” But of course “this,” zōon logon ekhon, echoes (453), it “resonates,” “reverberates,” “arrives,” “affords,” “muffles,” “relieves,” “envelops” (ibid)—in language, in being, in its own un- certain translatability (454). Here I leave zōon logon ekhon alone (as much as it can be, which is to say, here), without choosing one or many translations of it. Analogically, however, this rhythmic saturation of the echoing returns the name, “Aristotle,” upon which has paused the propitious moment of other echoes and disruptions. Doxtader is right, I think, for even if Deleuze can say that Aristotelian difference also echoes (representation), it echoes echoes, and so this question, “At what cost does possession come?” already trembles in this movement of difference to passage, of analogy. If for Deleuze analogy was already analogous for analogy qua the Kantian synthesis of judgment, and (as) the identity of the concept (Difference, 33), the analogous representation of difference is the dispossessing echo of differentiation “in” the philosophy of difference. Still, “this” echo doesn’t only pause us. Echoes reflect passage, and reflection is the difference of passage at the interface. In echo, Doxtader argues persuasively, zōon logon ekhon is possessed dispossesively even in its named sources, and so “both mis-placed and mis-taken” such that its (“perhaps”) “sovereign- making function calls for a gesture in return” (ibid, emphasis mine). If this question, of-in-return, is difficult to pose and to hear (455), and I agree that it is, I pose it analogically in pause. Recall that I named the passage and the analogy as the negative horizons of Deleuzian difference through Aristotle—that which doesn’t constitute his philosophy of difference, for both return representation. “Ekhon rings with a question,” Doxtader seems to respond, of what counts as possession (464), for we cannot hold in our reading of Aristotle that having-logos is a what-(that)-has-logos (463), any more than “an outright and recurring failure to hear the passages” (465). If it’s possible to say that “this” echo is to Aristotle what discovery is to America, perhaps what the pause stills is the “echo that arrives without question … as a kind of myth, a source of founding power that conserves its own source in the name” (ibid). At what cost does possession come? I pause here once more, to recall another of Doxtader’s significant questions, posed as an indirect answer to the first pause. An echo “arrives in a flash” (453), but the “question of recognizability appears in a flash, a flash of fragments that disclose a constellation: a question of what recognition may (not) name, a question of its (in)finite creative power” (2015, 380, emphasis mine). The arrival and the appearance: “the risk of such an (un)assuming (dis)possession,” in a flash, “is a tragic fall” (ibid, 388). At what cost does possession come? At the cost of analogy: the granting of the passage, of the future. I remain in approach to this claim. See Erik Doxtader, “The Recognizability of Recognition: Fragments in the Name of a Not Yet Rhetorical Question,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48, no. 4 (2015), 379-412; “Zōon Logon Ekhon: (Dis)possessing an Echo of Barbarism,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017), 452-472. See also Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Aristotle, Metaphysics: Books Z and H, translated by David Bostock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 25 “Destiny acted itself out /Deciding for me where I would come from /And what I would become.” Alootook Ipellie, “Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border,” An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, ed. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 263-267. 26 It should be noted that anthropological interest in Inuit dreaming has a relatively significant literature and scholarly interest. See for example David Riches, “‘Very Serious Reflections’: Inuit Dreams about Salvation and Loss in Eighteenth- Century Labrador,” Ethnohistory 36, no. 2 (1989), 48–69; Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, “Erotic Dreams, Mystical Kinship, and Shamanism,” North Atlantic Studies 4, no. 1-2 (2001), 5-12. 27 Today Iqaluit is the capital and the administrative hub of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, ᓄᓇᕗᑦ, or “Our Land.”

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Annie in a restaurant. Their eyes meet. They look at each other for some time until Annie finally speaks to Monica: “Trade spots?”28 These words, in the text where they are now found, are put into relation to the regimes of care that compose the contemporary scene of

Inuit epidemic.29 Monica’s dream is therefore a story of expectation.30 Stevenson tells another story of another dream, this time told by Nasuk.31 Nasuk tells the story of her mother’s dream while she was pregnant with her after the death of an old man named

Nasuk: “She saw him [Nasuk] and he was asking her to amaq him,” which is to carry him as a child would be carried in the hood of the parka. But Nasuk’s mother realized that

Nasuk was too heavy for this. So, “Sila’s mother knew32 she had to call her baby Nasuk,

28 Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 93. Monica, at the time this story is told, is fourteen years old, Annie is presumably the same age. This dream sets the ground for Stevenson’s story of Monica’s life in the regime of Inuit suicide prevention, wherein she evocatively claims—correctly, I would judge—that Inuit are “expected” to kill themselves (82). Yet Stevenson and I have both staged this dream, and it’s to this that I would call attention. In Stevenson’s text, which continues through Monica’s difficult relationship with her mother and father, addiction, and the claim “It’s not that I’m suicidal, but sometimes I don’t want to live anymore” (94), the words “Trade places” stages the expectation. My own staging draws out its passage to expectation. If negotiation is at work in every word, does “Trade spots?” let the future come in Stevenson’s sense of expectancy? My wager is that trying to answer this question evokes the stakes, not of expectancy, but of analogy. 29 Already in 2000, The New York Times ran an article by James Brooke who wrote, “the free-ranging Inuit shifted in status from lords of the Arctic to wards of the welfare state. Abandoning their traditional, never-give-up view of life, the Inuit now commit suicide at seven times the national average.” The suicide “cuts into once hardy peoples who already have been undermined by alcohol, unemployment and a deep sense of powerlessness.” A decade and a half later, Nikki Wiart, writing for World Policy, also argues that the loss of movement, “forced from their land and onto settlements,” has made suicide “a new and tragic part of everyday life.” Like residential schools, Wiart concludes, takes children away from their parents, “lending to that feeling of ‘futurelessness’ so many report.” See David Brooke, “Canada’s Bleak North Is Fertile Ground for Suicide,” The New York Times December 18, 2000, accessed at: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/18/world/canada-s-bleak-north-is-fertile-ground-for-suicide.html; Nikki Wiart, “Nunavut’s Suicide Epidemic,” World Policy, July 22, 2015, accessed at: https://worldpolicy.org/2015/07/22/nunavuts- suicide-epidemic/. 30 The anticipation and prohibition of Inuit suicide, writes Stevenson, means that future suicides “are imagined and the thoughts suppressed,” so that those like Monica who are living in a “postcolonial state that simultaneously bans and anticipates her death” reckon with an “uncanny doubling” (Beside, 97). By saying that she isn’t suicidal but sometimes wants to die, Monica’s claim is read by Stevenson as a “subtle” negotiation with the afterlife of an expectant apparatus, one whose “procedures and protocols have long since been followed” (ibid, emphasis mine), and thus a negotiation that “removes her, if only temporarily, from the suicide apparatus and allows her to acknowledge the ways in which her young life is marked by pain, anger, and injustice” (ibid, emphasis mine). 31 Her given name is Sila and this is how I will refer to her in footnote—indeed it’s how Stevenson herself refers to her. As Stevenson puts it: “Although kids at school usually call her Sila, there are many people in Iqaluit and Pangnirtung who call her Nasuk” (ibid, 105). Yet there is an uncertainty that emerges in the telling of the story to which I will return. This uncertainty is why, here in this footnote, she is Sila, but in the body of this text she is Nasuk. 32 To interrupt this story of the dream, this is a crucial moment. “Sila’s mother knew” is given in Stevenson’s text in the body of the paragraph of Sila’s telling of the story. So emerges our uncertainty: barring an unnamed intrusion of Stevenson’s narrative voice (which we must take into account), it’s not Sila telling the story, even though Stevenson

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and that only then, since his atiq33 would come to be in the young girl’s body, would she be able to amaq him as he requested.”34 Nasuk’s mother’s dream is also a story of expectation.35 Nasuk tells the story of her mother’s dream to evoke the story of the atiq, which relates to Stevenson’s argument about the imagistic life-of-the-name.36 In a sense, then, this is a story of the expectation of survival as the return. Yet there is also the passage given by the correspondence between the dream of Nasuk (Sila) and the dream of

Annie (Monica). The stories of these dreams share (in) the correspondence of the request—Trade spots?37—Will you amaq me?—that names the expectation of the in

will always refer to her as Sila. Rather it is, as I implied in the previous note, Nasuk referring to Sila through (their) mother. 33 The atiq (name) is the Inuit name-soul, one part of what Bernard Saladin d’Anglure calls the Inuit theory of the soul and reincarnation. The atiq is a “psychic principle inherited from a dead person or a spirit, which encompasses all of the experiences and abilities accumulated by everyone who previously held that name,” linked to the tarniq, the double- soul, a “miniature image” of the self which is held in pudlaq, an air bubble “lodged somewhere in the groin,” from which the tarniq escapes after death and becomes the “ethereal replica.” While the atiq seeks return to the world of the living, often appearing to women in dreams, the tarniq goes to the world of spirits only once the atiq has returned to life (Rebirth, 17). Stevenson, for her part, wants to link the atiq both with an amplification of the relation between naming and survivance (Beside, 109), and what she calls the life-of-the-name to a Freudian libidinal attachment (122) that extends into mourning by the living, and, from this, renders the life-of-the-name as an image “of the beloved object” (123) that can’t be abstracted by anonymous care regimes. The life-of-the-name survives, for its own sake, with death (126). There are echoes of Agamben’s bare life in the nameless/lifeless binary Stevenson evokes, wherein the name becomes the degree zero of survival in the first instance, and the name is a becoming survival by “being called into community” (ibid). I find this an unsatisfying answer not only because it abstracts the givenness of the name with transcendental being-in-relation, but also because it denies what Saladin d’Anglure calls the “death-seeking forces” that continue to exist once the atiq has returned as the manifest fetus—for example, as with the “beckoning” of the named stillborn “who shared the same umbilical cord” (Rebirth 25). Much still depends on the “clairvoyance,” one-sided communication, and spiritual tether that obtains between the atiq, the body of the mother, and the “opening” from which birth and re-birth is granted (16-17), to merely oppose life and name to nothingness and death. The atiq, rather than an undoing or opposition to death, is the carrying of the seeking of both life and death rather than the giving of the seeking that survives beyond death. See Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex, translated by Peter Frost (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019). See also Mariano and Tulimaaq Aupilaarjuk, et al., Interviewing Inuit Elders: Cosmology and Shamanism, edited by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 2001). 34 Stevenson, Beside, 105. 35 Stevenson elsewhere describes the attempt to call a friend in Iqaluit named Bobby. He had, on another occasion, admitted to her over the phone that he’d just tried, and twice failed, to hang himself (97). She describes meeting with him and talking, and spending the next evening with him, and finally convincing him to go to the emergency room— only to resolve in being given six sleeping pills (ibid, 98-100). But she doesn’t reach Bobby on the day she tries to call. Instead Sila’s voice is on the line. Stevenson writes that Sila describes being bored, trying and failing to take a shower, and feeling trapped in Iqaluit with nothing to do. “Months later,” she interrupts the story, “the wail of her voice will assail me over and over as I try to get her to leave her bedroom. Leave me alone. I want to die. But for now,” she offers, “I have no answer to her boredom, just as later I will have no answer for her desire to die” (129). 36 See note 28. 37 Stevenson saves the end of the story of the dream for her epilogue. “So yeah,” Monica goes on to say, “we just traded spots” (Beside, 172). Monica is then outside, crying, knowing Annie had died. Stevenson responds in the epilogue: “I don’t know what suicide always is. I sense sometimes it erupts out of intolerable pain, sometimes out of a feeling of pointlessness, and sometimes from impulsive anger. What else?” What else? What is “sometimes invested with the

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advance of the future. “Is it possible that territory,” asks Stevenson, “is a minor trophy of colonialism” when compared to the “domination of time?”38 Dreams are what help answer her question. The (counter)factual expectation of Inuit suicide makes the suicide

“real” such that there is an attendant exit from what awaits statistically, historically, and temporally.39 The statistics and regimes of care that produce its subjects are operationalized to the caregiver of the state and its economies, “measured and evaluated, fed through a system of best practices and evidence-based science … invested in a certain way of being in time.”40 But there are “other ways of being in time, other ways of looking at life in time that point to other possible worlds, times, and selves.”41 Through dreams,

“time is contradictory, and in that sense also doubled.”42 Moving into the dream and expressing it in life, for Stevenson, aren’t “simply the subjective fabulations of the dreamer,” but rather are “of another time, a discrepant temporality in which the dead and the living can meet again.”43 This other time is “existentially … carried out in the bodies and dreams of Inuit as they live out their lives” in the settlement.44 The dream space, as doubled time expressing and moving throughout the Inuit life-world, is in the

desire to live differently—to live ‘mythically,’ … to transcend the grinding psychic pain that accompanies colonization and to,” now quoting from Foucault, to rediscover the original moment in which I make myself world (172-173). Stevenson agrees with Foucault that suicide is a “form of” imagination (172). The suicide is the desire of the imagination, the belonging otherwise to world, the original moment, a response requiring a “way of listening that refuses to fix the other in place, thus allowing for new and unexpected correspondences to arise in each encounter” (173). 38 Ibid, 133. 39 In Monica’s case, this is the distinction between being suicidal and not wanting to live anymore (ibid, 96), which “removes her” (temporarily) from the apparatus of suicide that renders her body a factual real of the counterfactual future (97). 40 This is the shift work, appointments, drug scheduling, and the caregiver’s “attitudes to time” (ibid, 134). When time is something that the caregiver thinks of, which is to say from, other temporalities are coded as contradictory, uncanny, or redundant (144). 41 Ibid, 146-147. 42 Ibid, 144. 43 Ibid, 139. 44 Ibid, 147. While Stevenson will call this an “Inuit temporality,” I must avoid this claim. But that she draws these claims into the image is what grants correspondence between the object of this paper and her claims.

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ambivalence of knowledge.45 This ambivalence leads Stevenson to write: “In an age that is so obsessed with controlling the future as a way of having the present, Inuit suicide may be seen as a response to a future devoid of surprise,” making the suicide a “leap into another way of being in the time,” and so “an answer in one temporality … to a question that can’t be formulated in another.”46 So it is that the dreams name something else for

Stevenson, something implicit and emergent all throughout: the image. Stevenson names the image as what “captures,” rather, what “can capture uncertainty and contradiction without having to resolve it.”47 If I may parse Stevenson’s language somewhat, the image is what is given by the correspondence of indecision—an “elsewhere”48 of the voice, the

“hallucination”49 of the dream—with the movement that conditions the emergence of the image. The image, therefore, “takes hold of us”50 as a form of resistance against objectivity and facticity.51 Thus, the image is the constitutive prevention of what opens and closes in spacetime and as world.52 Stevenson, the anthropologist in the Arctic

“during a time of Inuit suicide,” stands before the subject of care.53

45 In what Stevenson calls the “contours of subjectivity” (ibid, 146) given in this ambivalent relation. 46 Ibid. She continues: “How do we pose the question of suicide alongside the question of time?” (Ibid, emphasis mine). 47 Ibid, 10, emphasis mine. 48 Ibid, 184. 49 Ibid, 12. It’s worth pointing out that, as Mariano Aupilaarjuk from Kangiq&iniq told Laugrand and Oosten in 1999, haminnaarijut, or halucinations, are distinguished from takutitauniit, visions, and dreams. Aupilaarjuk explains that takutitauniit “happen through the mind” and haminnaarijut “only happen through the eyes.” Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten, Inuit Shamanism and Christianity: Transitions and Transformations in the Twentieth Century (Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012), 221. 50 Ibid, 14. 51 Ibid, 15. These images can be pictoral (photographs, dreams, animal-metaphors), aural (voices, tones, affects, recordings) or grammatical (writing) (13). 52 Said another way, the sharing-in-relation that is the constitutive prevention granting the dream’s passage to the (time of the) suicide. 53 Ibid, 17. “In anthropology,” she writes, in the context of an “ethnographic book” (15), “we often think of ourselves as attending to what happens repeatedly. Our version of the empirical thus depends on a concept of the everyday that is stabilized through repetition…. Repetition, for the anthropologist, becomes something like the harbinger of ethnographic truth” (14, emphasis mine). But the image betrays the anthropology of repetition, calling for something other, something new. “In my own attempt to craft this other kind of anthropology something curious happens … the book’s mode (uncertainty), its method (image), and its object (care) begin to merge” (15, emphasis mine).

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So returns the painter of the canvas, who opens with what Deleuze calls the diagram as the “possibility of fact.”54 The painter paints paintings in escaping (through) expectation,55 and so manifests the catastrophe of figuration, the “operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones.”56 The zone is what grants indiscernibility and non-correspondence, but only as (in) fact in correspondence with a

“deep identity more profound” than identification.57 Out of the catastrophe of the zone, given by the (in) advance of the white of the canvas, emerges the “temporal diagram,” the rendering of frame, the qualified facticity, and of sensation, the intensivity of granting.

This relation is the elevation of the possibility of fact to the painting (invention), to the state of what Deleuze names “analogical language,”58 in the “apprenticeship” of the painting. Deleuze is only concerned with one form of analogy of the diagram, which he

54 Deleuze, Sensation, 89. I want to remain with the painter, the painting, and the canvas diagram, but recall that Deleuze and Guattari posited the diagram far beyond this “artistic” mode. “We require just a little order to protect us from chaos,” they concluded, though we “constantly lose” the “protective rules” that holds everything together (Philosophy, 201). Science, philosophy, and art, (and rhetoric too, no doubt), all want to “tear open the firmament” and plunge into the chaos (202). The painter crosses the catastrophe and leaves the “trace” on the canvas; the mathematician’s equations “arise from the abyss” through passing over “in anticipation of not being able” to “arrive” without “collisions”; and the “philosophical thought” doesn’t bring concepts together “in friendship” without “being traversed,” again, “by a fissure that leads them back to hatred or disperses them in the coexisting chaos where it is necessary to take them up again, to seek them out, to make a leap” (203, emphasis mine). But we should not miss the recurring presence of the umbrella (202-204, 208). “Peut-être était-ce le propos d'une phrase à écrire ici ou là”? (Spurs, 122). Peut-être “un code plus ou moins secret” (126)? Peut-être un parapluie “qu'on ne tient plus dans la main. Cette restance n'est entraînée en aucun trajet circulaire, aucun itinéraire propre entre son origine et sa fin. Son mouvement n'a aucun centre” (130). Perhaps. But are these “Bacon’s umbrellas,” the analogue of the contour that “heralds” the passage of the “return to the material structure,” the “intense movement” (Sensations, 18)? It seems not to be, for “thinking” in its “constant confrontation” with chaos (Philosophy, 208) appears as acts against the umbrella, tearing it open against its shielding from chaos. But then again, perhaps this is precisely “the point”: not to “give up finding the umbrella” as the shield from chaos, as Deleuze and Guattari write (ibid), but rather the umbrella as the heralding of the diagram, the diagram as the analogy of sensation, sensation as the rhythm of the future (of invention). The presence of the umbrella appears as the analogy (of) the granting of the passage. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, translated by Barbara Harlow (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979). 55 Here expectation names the givens, representations, similarities, codes in advance. 56 Deleuze, Sensation, 82. 57 Ibid, 20-22. A characteristic example in his study of Bacon’s paintings is “meat.” This is what he names the “common fact” of man and animal, the entire body as meat. This is the body without the “spatial structures” of bone, without the “flesh” that covers it (20). Meat is “the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally” (20-21). Said another way, meat is a “deep identity” as a “zone of indiscernibility” precisely because it is a factual given despite identification (22). For Deleuze, the zone is the “hole through which the entire body escapes” (24). 58 Ibid, 93.

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calls “aesthetic Analogy.” The diagram is the zone of indistinction as the prevention of expectation. To use Deleuze’s language, the digital code of similitude, resemblance, opposition, and identity has been disrupted by the manifestation of prevention, of nonrepresentation, nonnarrative, nonillustration. This is not the absence or immanent saturation of the diagram, for this would take analogy as its object (qua opposition), but rather of what prevents expectation through the possibility of facticity given in the passage of sharing-in-relation. This prevention enacts what Deleuze names the “notion of” modulation. Modulation is the naming of the passage of sensation granted in the diagram, the emergence of the nonsovereign existential communication of rhythm as the producer of resemblance. This is of course an aesthetic “notion,” as the painter is to the diagram, yet the passage pervades in the standing before no matter whether we call it the white of the canvas or the subject of care. Deleuze thus emerges the “middle way”59 of analogy — the liberation of resemblance in the passage of nonresemblance. In order for the painter to exit the canvas so as to produce a “more profound resemblance,” the “fact” that still shows an image of sharing-in-relation, the “diagram,” can’t dissolve what constitutes the painter or their object in advance. Rather, the diagram is the name of what “breaks through” the coordinates of the figure, as the agent of analogy.

59 Elsewhere I have drawn out the “middle way” of the passage between rhythm and material rhetoricity’s rendering of invention and kairos. Rhetoric, rhythm, and sovereignty are all given in their ambiguities, their incapacity for full apprehension in the concept. We might also add the “algorithm” to the ambiguous category, what Roberge and Seyfert argue is the “opacity of algorithms … more precisely expressed in different forms of opacity, all of which, in specific ways, are contingent on the in- betweenness of a plethora of actors, both human and non-human” (Algorithmic, 2). Algorithms “come to life in their own rhythm” (ibid). Elani Ikoniadu, who theorizes rhythm and the digital, shares with John Muckelbauer and Debra Hawhee the claim of the amodal, irregular, and always moving temporalities of rhythmicity “in the middle.” As Deleuze saturates these myriad responses, in all cases rhythm enables the movement of the middle, of signification and asignification, with the middle no longer being a space between two points, but rather an “intensive inhabitance,” or the singularity of an encounter. See especially Debra Hawhee, “Kairotic Encounters,” in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, edited by Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 16-35; Elani Ikoniadu, Rhythm and Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014); Jonathan Roberge and Robert Seyfert, “What Are Algorithmic Cultures?,” Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance, and New Technologies, edited by Robert Seyfert and Jonathan Roberge (London: Routledge, 2016), 1-25.

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The canvas and the subject, the diagram and the dream, the painting and the suicide: only at this juncture, finally, can I pass into the object of this essay.60 For five days in February 2014 the hamlet of Pangnirtung, Nunavut, announced the first instance of coding61 classes for Inuit. It was the first time Inuit gathered to code in the Nunangat, a territory with no computer science curriculum.62 At the time, it was named the “Nunavut

Code Club.”63 The Nunavut Code Club, in a community of 1,500, accepted nine students ranging in ages from 6 to 20. Working in both English and Inuktut, with the help of translators, students largely focused on video game development, attended to and sponsored in part by corporate representatives from Electronic Arts Games. The club was designed by Ryan Oliver and Tommy Akulukjuk of Pangnirtung-based tech start-up

Pinnguaq, which has since 2012 been building Inuktitut gaming and translation software.64 Then, the stated goal of the Nunavut Code Club was to “teach the basics of programming” so as to provide the means for Nunavummiut students to understand “how computers think” and to “better equip [them] to share and interpret their culture in the digital age” with the help of “industry experts, as well as code-savy [sic]

Nunavummiut.”65 The success of the club, which was to change over time, was then quantified by the small group’s output, various media attention, and its perceived capacity

60 But the work done already to draw the relation between the Deleuzian analogy and the image, of the diagram and the dream, is already, often unnamed, the logic of this essay’s claim. 61 In other words: computer programming classes. 62 Matthew Mallon and Samantha Lee Dawson, “Nunavut Now,” Up Here: Life in Canada’s Far North, April 1, 2014, accessed at: http://uphere.ca/post/81412115179/nunavut-now. 63 This followed in the spirit of the volunteer-run afterschool “UK Code Club” programs that gained massive popularity in the years following its inception in 2013, amassing a network of thousands of coding teachers and classes aimed at children aged 9 to 11, providing students with introductions to basic programming, HTML, CSS, and eventually more complex high-level programming languages like Python. See Stuart Dredge, “Code Club Opens Up Its Coding-For- Kids Projects for UK Parents and Teachers,” The Guardian, March 14, 2014, accessed at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/14/code- club-kids-coding-programming-uk. 64 Ryan Oliver, “Why an Arctic Startup?,” Pinnguaq, November 8, 2013. 65 Ryan Oliver, “The Nunavut Code Club Pitch,” Pinnguaq, April 19, 2014.

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for the development of non-mining employment potential. Pinnguaq, in interviews and on their website, understood the natural resource economy and its operations in the Arctic as a finite resource that new digital industries would help alleviate: “Nunavut is officially on the clock. We have a limited amount of time until there is nothing left to take …

Nunavut’s unique geography means that once the mining stops we’re back to square one … [we must] begin thinking beyond mining and [leverage] opportunities … to foster the development of truly sustainable industries.”66 To an extent this paper responds to a series of strands, inquiries, and scholarship that posits the relation, urgency, and vitality of land, future, and technology for Indigenous peoples. Land and relation, future and expectancy, possibility and technē are what issue from these literatures, and indeed of their interrelations and interconnectivities. My interjection, with Indigenous peoples and scholars, therefore also concerns the future of code. But my approach can’t posit the

“toward” of that future in the identity of Indigeneity or territory—whether toward the

“emergent,” toward the project(ion) of, or toward the being of—any more than I can posit an adverbial excess, to the point of excess, and thus no “over-” and no “beyond.” Instead, this essay struggles with the approach as (in) the rhetorical granting of future: this essay is in negotiation to the passage67 of an (in) advance named “code.” As I have already drawn

66 Ryan Oliver, “Northern Business Reality Requires Southern Allies,” Pinnguaq, January 29, 2014. These remarks are no longer available online, presumably because Oliver and Pinnguaq have come to understand the situation differently. Still, there is no doubt that Nunavut being “on the clock,” as Stevenson has implied about the regimes of care toward the suicide, or the finitude of resource extraction, as pervades the discourse of the Anthropocene and climate change, are both given in (of) code’s passage to the Nunangat. Learning to code is of course cast as the absolute necessity for the future—as a skill, equipment, fact, or claim. What’s the status of a person that doesn’t know how to code? No doubt they linger cancerously—productively unproductive to “life”—in the body. For it is not that those who cannot code simply have no future, already an Arctic refrain, but that the future is coded-in-production. Those who can’t code are coded as unproductive bodies to the future—mined, not minds. Read as such, the future is of expectation, in the future, prior to time immemoriality. The future moves through code before the stories, protocols, practices, and the self- determination. “Code,” as I understand it in approach to the Arctic, is not metonymic to conditions in the global economy or to the form of its correspondence, as transit or circulation or some model of subjectivity, but rather names the granting of the passage of its own indication, of the naming of the in advance given in the future that waited for it. 67 The laisser, the allowance, but also the leaving or letting [laissez-faire] as the movement that comes upon the capacity to-have-let. Derrida continues along this line of thinking while reflecting on seeing (again) the image of

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out through implication and correspondence, negotiation isn’t a method,68 but rather names the granting through which passage opens to future. This essay will not, and indeed it cannot, make a claim about the figurative production of coders—their work, their claims and discursive practices, the platforms they provide, and their multiplicitous futures—because, in approaching the question of code for the Arctic, this essay is in

Pascale Ogier after her death, saying: “The other, who is dead, was someone for whom a world, that is to say, a possible infinity or a possible indefinity of experiences was open. It is an opening. Finite-infinite, infinitely finite. Pascale Ogier saw, she will have seen, she did see. There was a world for her. From this other origin, this one that I cannot reappropriate,” this other origin, that is to say, of having-had in the time of the “was,” the opening that waits in advance and opens to the origin of what gazes upon the “we,” Derrida continues, “from this infinitely other place, I am watched” (Echographies, 123, emphasis mine). Much is at stake in code, and in naming, in this withdrawn-infinity from which we are watched, as I will try to “show.” But as A.W. Moore has argued, perhaps correctly, I will fail to show anything. “I appear to be able to grasp the infinite as that which is ungraspable. The solution is to deny that I can grasp it in any way. There is nothing there to be grasped” (Infinite, 225). But “I am shown something” (224) metaphysically, and, in being shown, I “crave” the empirical (mathematical) expression of what I am shown, to show it and to hold it (231). But I cannot hold it, for what I am shown is a bounded-togetherness, a sharing-in-relation that recedes, always, and denies its contained wholeness (ibid). I seek to show “it” but I am only shown, and in the seeking to show can’t show anything—except analogy. See A.W. Moore, The Infinite (New York: Routledge, 1991). 68 This isn’t factual, strictly speaking, in the sense that negotiation precisely does constitute a methodological impulse for Derrida in particular contexts—as with translation, conceptual border, or administration (Echographies, 13). Deleuze confirms the particularity of this mode of negotiation qua methodology in conversation with Antoine Dulaure and Claire Parnet. Responding to the “relations between” art, science, and philosophy, Deleuze argues for a necessary recognition that “the interplay between the different lines isn't a matter of one monitoring or reflecting another. A discipline that set out to follow a creative movement coming from outside would itself relinquish any creative role. You'll get nowhere by latching onto some parallel movement, you have to make a move yourself. If nobody makes a move, nobody gets anywhere. Nor is interplay an exchange: it all turns on giving or taking” (Negotiations, 125, emphasis mine). Where I depart from negotiation as a method is in the analogical, for the analogical is not a method but a passage. Take Keiji Nishitani’s claim that nihilism is not a question: “The attitude of wanting to know about nihilism, or the desire to know in order not to be left behind in conversation, means that from the start one is questioning from the standpoint of ‘society’ and not from ‘the self itself.’” This is to say, nihilism can’t be a “topic,” or object to be shown, for if it “is anything, it is first of all a problem of the self. And it becomes such a problem only when the self becomes a problem, when the ground of the existence called ‘self’ becomes a problem for itself’” (Nishitani 1). The question of nihilism, like the question of infinity, is a matter of being shown (see note 59). But what obscures, despite the lack of desire or question, would be the “observing,” the “standpoint of observation” (2)—analogous to the “visual field” (Tractatus 5.633) problem of the metaphysical subject, what Wittgenstein called the “limit of the world” (5.622). It’s for this reason that nihilism can be neither a question nor an answer. Rather, it is “a compelling force,” the “most primal and fundamental” of refusal (3). For his part, Deleuze asks if the painter can “render sensible,” “render visible,” Time (Sensation, 49). His answer turns on what sensation is. He argues that sensation is vibration (39), which is the relation of force that obtains on/between different sense-levels of the body (what experiences the event). In another book (Cinema I) he will respond with the “time-image,” but in this particular book on the painter he responds, instead, with what I take to be a more evocative claim: “Between a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an existential communication that would constitute the ‘pathic’ (non-representative) moment of the sensation” (37, emphasis mine). To “render” Time visible means making visible “a kind of originary unity of the senses,” or a “vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all” (ibid)—this is what he names “Rhythm” (ibid). So when Deleuze argues that the “relation between sensation and rhythm” is what is ultimately at stake in the non-representative, or when Nishitani argues that nihilism, though still a historical emergence (Nishitani 8), is the “compelling force” of the “most primal and fundamental,” both are opening toward negotiation as rhythm, and rhythm as the enablement of the granting of passage. As I have been, and will be arguing throughout, analogy is the granting of the passage of the in- advance of the future. Analogy is not, therefore, a matter of similarity or relation, but of the future. See Keiji Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, translated by Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1992, translated by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2002). On his response to the image and time, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2004).

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negotiation to (of) the passage of granting. Therefore, I do not name “code” as the future of coders, but rather the naming of that which is in advance and, in naming, grants passage. Code is in the passage of coming to the Inuit Nunangat. Code, in the naming of passage, is not the future of the Arctic; it is the waiting for analogy.

The Passage of …

In the first year of the Code Club in Pangnirtung, Pinnguaq found that they would spend a lot time trying and failing to get online, which led to the realization that the future of the coding curriculum in Nunavut was beholden to broadband infrastructure, jurisdiction, governance, and capacity.69 Concern for the future of Inuit coders therefore shifted from the exhaustibility of the land itself to the emptiness of the future of the project given the conditions of Nunavut’s digital infrastructure.70 Whereas the club was about the sustainability of Inuit economy—the inexhaustible resource of minds as opposed to the finite resource of mines—sustainability shifted into curricular project development in lieu of missing educational program commitments and territory-wide infrastructural development.71 By 2017, the Pinnguaq redefined their goals, adopting a focus on mental health, “capacity building,” and the sharing and networking of cultural expression. Their new coding curriculum, named “te(a)ch,” no longer had the narrow focus of “how

69 Communities with limited infrastructure, Internet connectivity, and a lack of computers were a challenge to bring coding classes to. Even if they did manage to get online, how to make the lessons repeatable with no access to the tools necessary? See Katherine Laidlaw, “This Startup is Teaching Coding to Canada’s Most Isolated Kids,” Wired, September 10, 2017, accessed at: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/pinnguaq-nunavut-computer-science-education- canada. 70 In Oliver’s words: “One of things we found with Code Club was it was not very sustainable…. We could go into a community for five days, but then when we’re done, we were taking all the knowledge with us” (CBC 2017). This is a familiar story in the Arctic, whose peoples routinely suffer the “research fatigue” of experts flying into the communities for a short period of time and escaping with the knowledge. Rather than merely impart “how computers think,” those involved in a 2017 workshop in Iqaluit were taught that computers are “tools of expression” that allow the participation in conversation of technology rather than its “passive consumption.” See Sara Frizzell, “Iqaluit Kids Go Home With Free Laptops After Coding Workshop,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 18, 2017, accessed at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/coding-course-free-laptop-1.3989314. 71 Pinnguaq, 2017.

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computers think,”72 but rather sought to encourage both capacity building at the community level, what it calls “sustainable knowledge and skills acquisition,” and to impart community leaders (as “ambassadors”) with code skills and knowledge of the curricula that can be expanded into year-long education projects. Pinnguaq’s code curriculum, that is to say, moved into the question of connectivity.

Connectivity, as the Arctic Council Task Force on Improved Connectivity in the

Arctic (TFICA) recently concluded,73 “has become one of the key factors to help close economic, social and territorial divides, supporting the modernization of local economies and underpinning the diversification of economic activities.”74 The 2019 TFICA Report states that as “the Arctic is opening up, modern connectivity will underpin economic growth, and allow for the delivery of better services to Arctic peoples.”75 Driving diversification is the impetus to close the “digital connectivity gap”76 or the “digital divide”77 in remote Northern and Arctic regions. Currently, Nunavut’s broadband networks are built on the “backbone” of the Qiniq network of satellites provided by

Telesat,78 which connect to SSi Micro’s79 teleport and data centre located in Ottawa,

72 “The benefits of te(a)ch extend well beyond simply teaching “how a computer thinks”—the program is equally about capacity building, artistic expression, and mental health—as well as empowering participants to discover and express cultural identity.” See Pinnguaq, te(a)ch, accessed at: https://teachnunavut.com/en/about. 73 Task Force on Improved Connectivity in the Arctic, “Report: Improving Connectivity in the Arctic,” Arctic Council, May 7, 2019, accessed at: https://oaarchive.arctic-council.org/handle/11374/2369. 74 “Arctic Council Task Force on Improved Connectivity in the Arctic (TFICA),” Northern Public Affairs Special Issue on Connectivity in Northern and Indigenous Communities 6, no. 2 (October 2018), 73. 75 TFICA, Report, 11, emphasis mine. 76 Ibid, 12. 77 “Broadband Fund: Closing the Digital Divide,” Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, 2019, accessed at: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/internet/internet.htm. 78 An Ottawa-based satellite communications company whose “teleports,” which connect to the satellites, are located in Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, and St. Johns, and only two in the North, one in Iqaluit, Nunavut, and one in Yellowknife, Yukon. See Telesat, “Our Fleet,” https://www.telesat.com/our-fleet#fleet. 79 Perhaps it’s coincidence and perhaps it’s providence that the “founding father” of SSi Micro, Sieg Philipp, moved from East Germany to Fort Providence, Northwest Territories, and met who was to become his wife, Memoree. The couple owned a coffee shop and restaurant, and an inn in the 1960s and 70s, giving birth to a son, Jeff Philipp, whose “passion for computers” in the 1980s made him the “go-to guy in Fort Providence for anyone who needed a computer. A few sales led to several sales, and by 1990 the family business included a small computer store beside the restaurant.”

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Ontario.80 Coupled with the remoteness of communities and the overall costs of maintenance and construction, and that “over half of Qiniq’s communities actually operate at a loss due to their small populations,”81 Nunavummiut are paying some of the most expensive prices for Internet access in Canada.82 But without connectivity, concludes TFICA, “the Arctic risks falling even further behind in an economic development” moving steadfastly “towards digitalization.”83 Thus, in 2018, SpaceX’s

Falcon 9 launch deployed Telesat’s Telstar 19 VANTAGE satellite, which services all 25

Nunavut communities and promises to greatly increase speeds from 5 to 15Mbps.84

Coupled with Telesat’s intention to deploy a constellation of low earth orbit (LEO)

Today, SSi Micro is responsible for wireless telecommunications access to all 25 communities in Nunavut. See SSi Micro, “Northern Roots,” accessed at: https://www.ssimicro.com/northern-roots/. 80 Venoit, “Qiniq,” 67. “In the communities, ‘last mile’ connectivity is delivered with wireless technology, connecting customer devices to SSi’s antennas on towers and rooftops. The data is carried to a communications gateway, which in turn is linked to a satellite.” Because of the satellite network providing broadband service, every community is outfitted with what are called “earth stations,” composed of large dish antennae and steel towers, and gateway facilities “built in customized shipping containers to hold all necessary electronic equipment” (70). The delivery, maintenance, and replacement of this equipment is structured around narrow transportation windows in the summer, when sea lanes are ice free, and expensive small aircraft deliveries with “very expensive freight capacity, minimal flight schedules, and frequent [weather-related] cancellations” (ibid). As part of the TFICA Report findings, a “number of companies are currently competing to be first-to-market with a fully functioning constellation of next generation, high-throughput [Low Earth Orbit] satellites to provide broadband and other data services…. While the number of satellites in each company’s constellation differs from as low as approximately 100 satellites, as with to as high as 4,500 satellites,” as with SpaceX’s “Starlink” constellation, “most share similar commercial objectives.” Ergo, provided the development of one or more of these satellite constellations, they are “being built to serve the entire surface of the Earth. As a result, Arctic areas should be able to capitalize on the high-level private sector investments in this new technology” (TFICA, Report, 18). 81 Ibid, 71. 82 “The average Qiniq customer pays $80[CAD]/month for 25 gigabytes of data usage at a 3Mbps download speed,” whereas Canadians in the south pay “similar or slightly higher monthly” rates for unlimited usage at 50Mbps (ibid). “A long-term solution,” argues Veniot, will require much more capacity” (72). But as the TFICA Report found, “existing and emerging connectivity technologies are expected to become more widely available which, if successfully coordinated with industry, could improve service in the circumpolar regions” (TFICA, Report, 12). This has already meant “a new trend” of the development of data centres in some Arctic territories “related to lower cooling energy costs and a safe operating environment” (ibid). See also Lefteris Karagiannopoulos, “After Facebook, Sweden is Set for More Data Center Deals, Says Power Utility,” Arctic Today, May 10, 2018, accessed at: https://www.arctictoday.com/facebook-sweden-set-data-center-deals-says-power-utility/. 83 TFICA, Report, 42. Yet, one of the key findings of the Report is that a “digital economy is taking shape in the Arctic” (46). 84 “Northwestel & Telesat Get Millions of Federal Gov’t Dollars to Improve Broadband Service in Nunavut,” First Mile, July 25, 2018, accessed at: http://firstmile.ca/northwestel-telesat-get-millions-of-federal-govt-dollars-to-improve- broadband-service-in-nunavut/.

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satellites, and Northwestel85 receiving $49.9 million for the construction of satellite earth stations to vastly improve the connectivity speeds in Nunavut, connectivity is also an ever-present expectation in the Nunangat.86

“Believe it or not,” write Stephan Steinicke and Andreas Raspotnik, “the Arctic’s economic future will be driven by global digitalisation.”87 Perhaps this isn’t so unbelievable. “In this context,” they continue, in this context as a spatial reference, but also a planetary “context,” wherein the “cold temperatures” come to be, to be-come,88

85 A telecommunications carrier, incorporated under the Northwestel name in 1979, serving far Northern Canadian communities. The company was first named “Canadian National Telegraphs,” which was contracted by the Canadian government to manage and maintain the landline telephone network built during the construction of the Alaska Highway—linking Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska through Whitehorse, Yukon—by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1942 during the Second World War after the attack on Pearl Harbor helped define the Arctic as a contemporary theatre of forecasting technology. As Northwestel write of their history: “On September 24, 1901, the completion of the Yukon Telegraph line connecting Vancouver to Dawson City forever changed the relationship between the remote Canadian North and the outside world. ‘Time and space are annihilated,’ Yukon Commissioner William Ogilvie wrote to Ottawa in one of the first messages transmitted over the new telegraph. ‘We are of the world now.’” See “History,” Northwestel, accessed at: https://www.nwtel.ca/about-us/who-we-are/history. 86 Yet it is important to recall that the communications network in Nunavut has been long promised and expected, was originally planned during the writing of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, and, as Madeline Redfern reminds, had its own article before being removed (Dalseg, 17). Jim Bell argued that the Nunangat has for a long time been the promise of “a state-of-the-art electronic communications network,” long been described as a place of “rapid change” calling for the construction of a “reliable, efficient communications network.” While Bell praises the 2005 emergence of the Qiniq network finally bringing “affordable” Internet access to Nunavut communities, many “utopian” visions for connectivity have come and gone. “As for the state-of-the-art telecommunications system that planners had envisioned for Nunavut,” Bell concludes, “Nunavut still waits.” See Sheena Kedley Dalseg, “In Conversation: Mayor Madeline Redfern,” Northern Public Affairs Special Issue on Connectivity in Northern and Indigenous Communities 6, no. 2 (October 2018), 15-19; Jim Bell, “The Connected Territory? Nunavut Still Waits,” Nunatsiaq, April 1, 2019, accessed at: https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/the-connected-territory-nunavut-still-waits/. 87 Stephan Steinicke and Andreas Raspotnik, “Commentary: The Arctic’s Economic Future is Digital,” High North News, February 7, 2017, accessed at: https://www.highnorthnews.com/nb/commentary-arctics-economic-future-digital. 88 Be-come as emergence, but also in approach. As Natan Obed, the President of Inuit Tapariit Katanami (ITK), the national Inuit representative organization for the Inuit Nunangat, recently wrote: “Inuit Nunangat has more to offer than simply serving as a warning to the rest of the world about the catastrophic changes to come” (Obed, 2019). Obed was writing in the wake of the release of ITK’s “National Inuit Climate Change Strategy” (NICCS) that, among other things, calls for a shared relation among Inuit and decision-making bodies in regulating the role of climate change decision making for the Nunangat. “We can afford nothing less than transformative actions to drastically curb GHG emissions and proactively adapt to current and emerging climate risks. As diverse as we are, every human being on this planet is bound by an interdependence on the environment and profound concern for the future of our children,” argues the report (3, emphasis mine). By 2050, the “the majority” of infrastructure in the Canadian Arctic will be damaged by permafrost melt (2), and in light of other “dire projections” (ibid) and the Arctic as a “climate change hotspot” (4), “for climate actions to be effective, appropriate, equitable, and sustainable for Inuit Nunangat, they must be in line with our collective Inuit vision for building the sustainability, prosperity, and well-being of our communities in the face of a changing climate” (4). The NICCS therefore positions Inuit as more than “passive participants” of change (6) and envisions “a future where our communities are self-sufficient and we no longer face social, economic, and health inequities compared to other Canadians” through the promotion of self-determined “governance models” to manage the risks of change and “allow [Inuit] to benefit directly from climate change opportunities—including the adoption of new and emerging cleaner technologies—while protecting our food, water, and energy security” (8). See Natan Obed, “How Climate Change Is Destroying the Arcrtic,” Maclean’s, June 8, 2019, accessed at: https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/climate-change-is-destroying-the-arctic-and-threatening-the-way-of-life-for-inuit/;

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“one of the Arctic’s most valuable natural resources.”89 Two years after this forecast the claim is repeated, becoming, perhaps, a foretelling: Internet infrastructure “is coming to the Arctic,” and the “Arctic should teach its kids to code.”90 There is potential and opportunity in this foretelling, this coming-to-the-Arctic, “that can only be tapped if people have the right skills.”91 Melting ice is the opportunity for crowdsourcing data “to better forecast risks to infrastructure and the need for relocation,” “make towns less reliant on physical schools in times of crisis,”92 and fashion relationships between business, multinationals, and global governments. The Arctic Economic Council (AEC) concurs; writing for their 2018 Top of the World Arctic Broadband Summit, they claim that one of the “factors driving the Arctic’s future” is global digitalization.93 And though, as they opened in their Arctic Broadband Recommendations report, “interconnectivity of people, communities, governments, businesses and beyond is one of the hallmarks of these opening decades of the 21st century,” the Arctic is still “in danger of being left behind.”94 So long as the Arctic plays host to massive infrastructural development, including the construction of data centres and subsea optic cables,95 broadband

“National Inuit Climate Change Strategy,” Inuit Tapariit Kanatami (2019), accessed at: https://www.itk.ca/wp- content/uploads/2019/06/ITK_Climate-Change-Strategy_English.pdf. 89 Ibid. 90 Edouard Aubry, “Teach Code to Arctic Children to Empower a New Generation,” Arctic Today, February 15, 2019, accessed at: https://www.arctictoday.com/teach-code-to-arctic-children-to-empower-a-new-generation/. 91 Ibid. Assuming the apprehension of these skills, communities’ “challenges” have a chance to be addressed. 92 Ibid. 93 “3rd Top of the World Arctic Broadband Summit,” Arctic Economic Council, June 27-28, 2018, accessed at: https://arcticeconomiccouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/181912_AEC_Program_WEB-002.pdf. 94 “Arctic Broadband: Recommendations for an Interconnected Arctic,” Arctic Economic Council, Telecommunications Infrastructure Working Group (2016), 5. 95 Steinicke and Raspotnik note that “the digital economy depends on physical infrastructure that makes digital flows possible” and the Arctic, in this sense, has a “climatological as well as a geographical competitive advantage.” The 2016 Data Centre Risk Index rated the Arctic as “the lowest risk environment for data centres,” which are still colder than other parts of the world despite climate change—and, yet, increasingly represented as a site for these centres in part because of it. Fibre optic cables, according to the 2019 “Global Fibre Optic Cable Market” Report, “is expected to reach approximately USD 11.67 billion by 2025 at a [compound annual growth rate] of 11.18% from 2013 to 2025.” The Arctic Ocean is in this sense a future in wait for what wait for its: the space of infrastructural expansion, and what Steinicke and Raspotnik call a “profitable [geographic] shortcut” between continents with the potential to “save 24

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connectivity96 persuades “the potential to transform education by giving teachers and students access to learning resources and technologies that will allow them to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to live and work in the 21st Century.”97 The Arctic, the

Report concludes, will “undergo more changes in the 21st century due to increased human activity than perhaps any other region on Earth.” As such, the “deployment and adoption of a variety of broadband technologies can enable the expanding Arctic population to grow and prosper economically and socially while also protecting the environment and indigenous traditions.”98 In this context, Infrastructure Canada’s “Smart

City Challenge,”99 imploring communities to “measure” and “take risks,” to “think big,

[to] identify significant, pressing, and perceived ‘un-solvable’ problems, and achieve outcomes through data and connected technology,” has particular salience to the Arctic and for Pinnguaq’s coding curriculum. The competition, part of the Government of

Canada’s “Investing in Canada” Plan,100 recently awarded $10 million to Pinnguaq’s

milliseconds in internet transmission speed.” See “Global Fibre Optic Cable Market Research Report: Forecast to 2025,” Industry Research, published October 2, 2018, accessed at: https://www.industryresearch.biz/global-fiber-optic-cable- market-research-report-forecast-to-2025-13384787. 96 There is a tension of “interconnectivity” and “connectivity” as it defines the future of Arctic digitalization in the AEC Broadband Report. For example, they write: “Broadband is already helping to shape the future of the maritime and aeronautical industries. Broadband-driven connectivity in the maritime industry is improving telematics, telemetry, efficiency, safety, and crew welfare and training. Broadband technology is beginning to expand to leisure ships as well, enhancing the passenger experience” (ibid, 11, emphasis mine). And as “the Arctic becomes increasingly important to the global economy, access to real-time information regarding weather and ice conditions is critical for navigation safety, efficiency of travel and regulatory compliance” (ibid, emphasis mine). On the one hand, the deployment of broadband infrastructure is a noted concern for private investment that fears the return on investment. The Report responds to these fears by saying that “increasing reliance on Arctic shipping routes, expanded oil and gas exploration, and other business activities in the region… may provide increased incentives for improved access to private finance” (19, emphasis mine). Interconnectivity is the implied spatial outcome of the change that calls together the value of connectivity as a 21st century necessity. In this sense, the “end of the Arctic” corresponds with Arctic interconnectivity. 97 Ibid, 9. 98 Ibid, 30. 99 A “pan-Canadian competition open to all municipalities, local or regional governments, and Indigenous communities (First Nations, Métis and Inuit)” that “empowers communities to adopt a smart cities approach to improve the lives of their residents through innovation, data and connected technology” (Infrastructure Canada, 2019). 100 A key infrastructural development plan implemented in 2016 by Justin Trudeau’s government, with a particular focus on “addressing the infrastructure gap within Indigenous communities” (5), and which broadly links climate change with global digital mobilization (2) into what could easily be called a circulation rhetoric: the flows and concentrations of infrastructure, data, natural resources, and people (10). See “Investing in Canada: Canada’s Long-

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“Katinnganiq: Community, Connectivity, and Digital Access for Life Promotion in

Nunavut” project, which seeks to “increase protective factors to the risk of suicide by increasing the amount and accessibility” of what it calls “life promoting activities, resources and support systems like peer networks, educational initiatives and creative outlets … in the expanded field of data and technology.”101 The goal of the project is the installation of permanent “makerspaces,” in a “network of physical and digital spaces,” acting as hubs for “digital and STEAM-based102 activities that amplify Inuit

Qaujimajatuqangit principles such as collaboration, creative problem-solving, and knowledge-sharing.”103 This will, they argue, empower young Inuit to “embrace the future with confidence, armed with new coping skills and tools.”104 Pinnguaq has therefore constituted the development of the coding curriculum and the development of digital tools, the closing of the digital divide, within the frame of Inuit suicide prevention by “offering opportunities for Nunavummiut” to “connect,” “share,” “access,” and

“express.”105 Makerspaces, to this end, “offer a gathering space for people to come together to be creative,” and are grounded in a DIY, “hackitivist” ethos, culture, and politics that “refers to practices of innovation and adaptations [that] have been deeply

Term Infrastructure Plan,” Infrastructure Canada (Ottawa, 2016), accessed at: http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/pub/index-eng.html. 101 “Smart Cities Challenge: Katinnganiq: Community, Connectivity, and Digital Access for Life Promotion in Nunavut,” Pinnguaq (March 2019), 3. 102 STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) is what Pinnguaq privileges over STEM. 103 They continue, with the “goals of increasing protective factors,” against suicide, “and contributing social equity with respect to the digital divide in Nunavut” (ibid). 104 Ibid. The wedding of digital technology and makerspaces is built on the concept of a “life promotion” approach to suicide prevention, which is citational to an online toolkit developed by the Ontario Centre of Excellent for Child and Youth Mental Health. In brief, the toolkit positions the honouring of a “young person’s individuality” in the context of recovery models that “build their resilience through their personal strengths, available resources and relationships with those around them” (qtd. in Katinnganiq, 4). 105 Ibid, 5. The life-promotion approach avoids the discrete application of suicide prevention programs toward the creation of “conditions” for “flourishing” (6) through the leveraging “of data and connected technology” (7).

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embedded in Inuit history and culture for millennia.”106 Described and understood as an

“organic extension” of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, the Arctic makerspace “creates conditions” for these already-existing tools of Inuit survival against the suicide.107 By circling back around to the tools and epistemological practices already coded into the architecture of Inuit survivance, makerspaces and coding, under the umbrella of the proposed Katinnganiq Makerspace Network (KMN),108 will allow the implementation of a coding and computer science curriculum that emerges out of, rather than enters into, the

Nunangat.109

An image also emerges. The correspondence of suicide, what Stevenson called the

“time of Inuit suicide,” with what Inuit Tapariit Katanami has called the “opportunities of” climate change, is granted in the “opening” to interconnectivity in the Arctic. In this image, Inuit are found to be returning upon the already existing foundation of Inuit knowledge as the capacity for the apprehension and sharing of the digital technology and coding. This is an important and recurrent insight that has been repeated by Indigenous scholars for decades, to which we will now briefly turn. But in this insight is also the

106 Ibid, 7. 107 Ibid, 8. 108 Ibid, 15. Every hamlet will constitute a “local” branch of the KMN network, forming a “bottom-up” governance model where the particularities of local needs are paramount, and each KMN-L become “the ‘owners’ and leaders of the initiative at the local level” operating in a “symbiotic relationship between the KMN and KMN-L,” balanced between their “respective roles under separate boards” (ibid). While the KMN-Ls are envisaged as implementation drivers with their own mandates, “the KMN will develop the frameworks, tools, processes and mechanisms, resources to support a culture of innovation that is firmly rooted in Inuit values” (19). Under this model, Pinnguaq would remain a partner organization answerable to the larger network, providing “on an arms-length contractual basis support for the activities under the direction” of the executive director of the KMN, “who will be hired by the board” (21). It remains to be seen whether this governance model will be implemented, or what the outcome of such an ambitious project will be. 109 Not just the coding curriculum, but the expanded wellness and cultural expression that is constitutive of Pinnguaq’s new program. They go on to say that “Makerspaces in Nunavut is focused on building pathways to life promotion and mental wellness for youth firmly grounded in Indigenous values by nurturing creativity, fostering agency, and building positive relationships while engaging in the expanded field of technology at the intersection of art, culture, science and education” (ibid). Part of the implementation of the project, which includes a response to the “digital divide,” includes the building of a hardware mesh network in partnership with Nunageek Solutions Inc. and Nuvujaq, a “network with hardware nodes that creates a local area network” (12). The risk here is the “inflating and growing” of costs to “the point of unsustainability,” which is why the approach “will be to support capacity building and learning for individuals through makerspace programming and curriculum that addresses networking more general (and mesh networks specifically if desire), alongside appropriate tools for practice and prototyping” (ibid).

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naming of code as technē, an expectation of the correspondence that obtains “between” the ontological and epistemological “divide.” As we have seen, if the work of code is there before the coder’s work begins, the code is given by its coming into, in advance.

This coming into, the be-coming of connectivity, is the granting in advance of

“interconnectivity,” of the very possibility for an “interconnected Arctic” that, in turn, names the figure of the Inuit coder.110

… Expectation …

Does the Inuit coder stand before the future of the Arctic? This essay has been in approach to this question. It is commonplace in the literatures charting the history of the

Inuit Nunangat and the transition period111 to both reckon with the profound change112 and the adaptation and subsistence of Inuit culture. As Katrina Soukoup reminds, “Inuit culture and identity has … remained profoundly tied to the land” and actively incorporates “Southern technologies and consumer products … while renewing and re-

110 Code, as the passage into the Nunangat, is the expectation of the in advance of the granting. We have seen this formula already in the painter standing before the canvas and the anthropologist standing before the suicide. 111 While the late 19th and early 20th century witnessed the establishment of the first Anglican (1894, Uumanarjuaq) and Roman Catholic (1912, in Igluligaarjuk) mission posts, and the widespread adoption of Christianity by 1940 throughout the Qikiqtaaluk region of the eastern Arctic and Kivalliq region further west in the mainland portion of contemporary Nunavut (Shamanism, 43-60), the most immediate and perhaps most profound changes occurred throughout the period of 1950-1975 in what George Wenzel called the “government period” (Animal, 33) and policy-makers in Ottawa were calling the “new north” (Grant, 212), including the installation of permanent settlements, residential schools, military infrastructure, judiciaries and police, and what the Qikiqtani Truth Commission has called the time “when Qallunaat [white people] began arriving in large numbers” (QTC, 16). See Shelagh D. Grant, Sovereignty or Security? Government Policy in the Canadian North, 1936-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988); George Wenzel, Animal Rights, Human Rights: Economy, Ecology, and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Qikiqtani Inuit Association, “QTC Final Report: Achieving Saimaqatiqiingniq,” Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Thematic Reports and Special Studies 1950–1975 (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, 2014). 112 As with perhaps all North American Indigenous peoples, the future of Inuit peoples during the earlier contact period of the 19th century are full of elegy, elegiac claims about the natural procession decline, and the fatal influences of newcomers (whalers and priests among them). As Laugrand and Oosten point out, early missionaries often noted, the “adoption of Western technology, clothing, and housing was considered the very proof of the decline of Inuit culture. Western observers did not consider the possibility that Inuit were incorporating and integrating Western technology, even Western religion, into their own cultural traditions” (Shamanism, 4).

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inventing ‘appropriated uses’.”113 Changes to everyday life thereby necessitated forms of translation, not only to technē but nonlocal notions. In 2005, the former Official

Languages Commissioner of Nunavut, Eva Aariak, and Leena Evic of the Pirurvik Centre chose the word ikiaqqivik, “traveling through layers,” as the Inuktut translation for

“Internet.”114 Though Aariak suggested the word was chosen principally as a method to preserve Inuit language115 in a landscape where angakkuit no longer exist116 to “travel through layers,” Soukoup reads ikiaqqivik as “an example of how Inuit are mapping

113 Katrina Soukoup, “Report: Travelling Through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New Technologies,” Canadian Journal of Communication 31, no. 1 (2006), 241. 114 Ibid, 239. See also Sara Minogue, “Inuktitut Computing Takes Shape,” Nunatsiaq July 8, 2005, accessed at: https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/inuktitut_computing_takes_shape/. Aariak is quoted as describing ikiaqqivik as a description for “what a shaman does when asked to find out how loved ones were doing, or where animals had gone, by traveling through time and space…. They used to travel all over the world—even to the moon…. The 1969 moon landing did not impress local elders…. They said: ‘We’ve already been there.’” Minogue’s article also notes that “e- mail” was translated irngiinaaqtauq, “the Inuktitut word for ‘instant.’” 115 Minogue, 2005. “‘We are not practicing shamans anymore, but we feel that it’s part of keeping our language alive,’Aariak says.” 116 Angakkuit, the plural form of angakkuq, is the Inuktut word for “shaman.” While, historically, the “institution” (Shamanism, 388) of shamanism is no longer present in the Nunangat and shows no sign of return, Laugrand and Oosten have persuasively argued that the adoption of Christianity, as with the adoption of tools, is never a process of abandonment. That is to say that while perhaps Inuit are no longer “practicing shamans,” as Aariak put it, the very capacity for the “travelling through layers” depended on the finding of what was there in advance. The acquisition of qaumaniq, “shamanic light and vision” (Shamanism, 201), and the assistance of tuurnagait, “helping spirits,” through initiation that varied in different communities, is what granted the angakkuq the power to travel through layers. The qaumaniq is derived from “qau,” for “light,” which “bathes” the angakkuq and provides a sight without seeing, a perception that grants the passage to encounter with beings and places that are hidden to other members of the community (202). Encounters “occur mainly out on the land” or in visions (takutitauniq) and dreams (sinaktuumaniq), the latter of which retains a vital importance to the “shamanic calling, in the initiation of angakkuit, and in Inuit conversation to Christianity” (201). Sinaktuumaniq are part of what link Inuit as human beings to the other-world of the spirit. As Mariano Aupilaarjuk from Kangiq&iniq told Laugrand and Oosten in 1999, “All animals dream; all that breathes has a right to these things like us humans” (221). Sinaktuumaniq, he continues, “can sometimes lie, although it seems to be real” (ibid). Aupilaarjuk went on to lament that dreams used to a form of teaching, sharing, and relation between elders and the young. Other forms of dreams, as told by elders Jaiku Pitsiulaaw and Aalasi Joamie, are “qunujaaqtuq (when a person dreams of something unpleasant, it is a sign that something bad will happen) and niriujaaqtuq (when a person dreams of something pleasant, it is a sign that something good will happen)” (222). Dreams, taking place on the tarniq level (241, see also footnote 30), are the indication of the “visionary connection,” and, with the adoption of Christianity, changed form: “Inuit began to experience visions of angels, Jesus, God, or Satan,” but “in these visions and dreams, old patterns were retained” (ibid). While the qaumaniq shifted from the tarniq transcendent gift of God (386), Inuit “embedded” their “shamanic traditions in a Christian perspective. Such transformations always imply a double process, changing the perspective of the past as well as that of the present. There is thus no point in looking for authenticity. Inuit always knew how to adapt, and their culture has always changed over time” (ibid). All this to say that while ikiaqqivik names a metaphor of survivance, the point should not be missed that the translation into Inuktut links in with the passage through the dream. As Laugrand and Oosten have shown, the angakkuit were given in the dream to the light that grants passage between layers as sight and the assessment of “the true state of things in the past as well as in the present” (308). Thus, the Internet splits just as the name: “always present in a dual way,” represented in the namesake and as “supporting their namesakes” (309).

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traditional concepts, values, and metaphors to make sense of contemporary realities and technologies.”117

If, as Indigenous scholars have long argued, “technology,” in scare quotes, “has always been a tool of Indigenous resistance,”118 then this is suggestive of approaches to code figured as in advance of address, redress, regard.119 Cheryl L’Hirondelle, in conversation with Sara Diamond, has suggested as much, where “relating” is honoured as an act of connection, both as a “subject protocol” and regard.120 But regardless of the temporal frame of these technologies, Julie Nagam has argued that “Indigenous artists who manipulate” them are inventing work that is “not bound to the Western linear temporal frameworks or static unthinking customs stemming from late modernity.”121

Nagam’s claim is taken up by Nancy Wachowich and Willow Scobie, who argue that

117 Soukoup, 239. 118 Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton, “Transmissions: The Future Possibilities of Indigenous Digital and New Media Art,” PUBLIC 54, edited by Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton (2016), 11. The term “resilience” is a relational term in several different registers of meaning—as for example Steven Loft’s (2014) cosmological staging of “all my relations,” as a refrain of “interaction of all things within an evolving, ever changing social, cultural, technological, aesthetic, political, and environmental intellectual framework” (xvi), in and of digitization—that should certainly be taken in relation to “the tools of Indigenous resistance.” In an interview at an Inuit-led film festival in Montréal in 2016, Igloliorte asks asinnajaq (Isabella-Rose Weetaluktuk of Inukjuak, Nunavik) how Unikausiit (history), Nuna (land), and Pimmariktuq (resilience) are related. She responds that history is embedded in the contemporary, land is “one of the central issues of identity for Inuit,” and that pimmariktuq is the ability to “move forward.” While the “tool,” which I now place in scare quotes, ought to be situated within this cosmological relation of time and space, my approach must be with what obtains from the “of,” the “tool of Indigenous resistance,” which is indivisible from this ability to move forward. See Heather Igloliorte, “Tillutarniit: History, Land, and Resilience in Inuit Film and Video,” PUBLIC 54, edited by Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton (2016), 105. See also Steven Loft, “Decolonizing the ‘Web’,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, edited by Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014). 119 There is a significant and, by now, long tradition of Indigenous critique and experimentation with cyberspace that I can’t rehearse here. However, for essential reading into Indigenous experimentation with “virtual reality” and cyberspace, see especially: Lewis and Skawennati, “Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace,” Cultural Survival (2005), http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/canada/aboriginal-territories-cyberspace; Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, “A Chatroom is Worth A Thousand Words,” CYB2K, http://www.cyberpowwow.net/STFwork.html; Loretta Todd, “Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace,” Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environment, edited by Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 179-194; Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, “Inherent Rights, Vision Rights,” Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environment, edited by Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 314- 318; Archer Pechawis, “Talking to my Horse, Whistling the Garry Owen,” APXO (2001), http://apxo.net/writing/talking-to-my-horse.html. 120 Cheryl L’Hirondelle, “Re:lating Necessity and Invention: How Sara Diamond and The Banff Centre Aided Indigenous New Media Production,” PUBLIC 54, edited by Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton (2016), 25-35. 121 Julie Nagam, “Deciphering the Refusal of the Digital and Binary Codes of Sovereignty/Self-Determination and Civilized/Savage,” PUBLIC 54, edited by Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton (2016), 88.

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Inuit YouTube videos subvert a Western epistemological and historical consciousness of

Inuit peoples by tactically “storying” lives otherwise governed and mediated by dominant media representations.122 These moves mean that Inuit can “claim their own narrative terrains in cyberspace and beyond.”123 Wachowich and Scobie, however, define the

Internet—where people make of it what they will124—as what “provides … platforms” for engagement.125 Steven Loft’s cosmological “intellectual ecosystem,” what he called

“media cosmology,”126 might also be evoked here. Rather than a repudiation of Western

“conceptions” of media ecology, the cosmology opens to an interlinking difference of landscape127: “a landscape, replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things—a space that mirrors, memorializes, and points to the structure of Indigenous thought.”128 In a mirroring is the route to Jackson 2bears’ “spectral theorization,” or “remix theory” of technē as

122 Nancy Wachowich and Willow Scobie, “Uploading Selves: Inuit Digital Storytelling on YouTube,” Études/Inuit/Studies 34, no. 2 (2010), 85. 123 Ibid. Though neither expressly political nor ideological, by subverting dominant “social forms,” Inuit youth stake what might be thought of as a sovereign claim perhaps in line with what Keavy Martin has called the “sovereign obscurity” of Inuit literature, the “unintelligibility” of Inuit storying given in the prioritization of audience (Martin, 16). See Keavy Martin, “The Sovereign Obscurity of Inuit Literature,” The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, edited by James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15-30. 124 Ibid, 86. 125 Ibid. This providing, a giving over, loses the question of code, which becomes metonymy for interface, for user, for stories, lives, and expression expressive of all that attends to the descriptors of its use in advance. If the content of this expression is itself a concrete and publicly available mode of expressing “decolonization as a practice”—as both discursive and lived—less is said about the passage of that provision. If the digital Inuk is well documented for the academy and its researchers, as for the Internet and some of its users, the coder is another question. 126 Loft, “Decolonizing,” xvi. 127 We might take as an analogue Thomas Rickert’s discussion of the chōra, the Platonic interactive ground of matter and activity (42), which becomes a “displaced place” (71) that is itself not only dis-placed but displaces place through the subjects of its inhabitance, both materially and psychologically (42), or, as he puts it: minds “are at once embodied … and dispersed into the environment itself, and hence no longer autonomous ... but composites of intellect, body, information, and scaffoldings of material artifacts” (43). The chōra therefore, as what “presents us with the limits of meaning and human artifice,” has withdrawal “built into origin, creation, and fabrication” (43). On this account, the chōra is the “dynamic circulation” of “revealing and concealing,” of the “‘infomaterial’ matrix” that is world (ibid)— and, as such, rhetoricity, at least of its ambient form, “reduces” the representation of human automaticity into the origin of withdrawal that is the enablement of intent, of invention (73), and therefore, of granting. Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). 128 Ibid.

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“something alive and filled with spirit,”129 analogous to, as the manifestation of, the

“animate artifacts,” “living entities,” or “sacred technologies”130 of the Haudenosaunee

False Face masks worn by the Society of Faces.131 In this sense the objective facticity of scientific rationality opens relationally to the seeing of that reality “to the spiritual essence” of its technology—to the spectral.132 Put another way, 2bears posits the

“interconnection,” not just of technē to animate spirit, but also of history to time immemoriality.133 Archer Pechawis gives this the name of a relation of “interdimensional communication,”134 wherein the “protocols that govern the ceremonial use” of traditional, analogue technology like drums, “are as specific as the protocols that govern traffic on the Internet.”135 While these spirits are called to, sung out, invited, this exchange with the spirit world “is not a metaphor” so much as a “fundamental aspect of ceremonial practice.”136

These myriad approaches to the digital—the spirit, the expectation, the passage, time immemoriality—are interconnected to Pinnguaq’s renewed approach to connectivity and code, rooted and routed into the terms of “what Inuit have always known to be true.”

But as Jason Edward Lewis argues, the “absence” of Indigenous peoples from the “future

129 Jackson 2bears, “My Post-Indian Technological Autobiography,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, edited by Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 19. 130 Ibid, 16. 131 Ibid, 15. 132 Ibid, 19. 133 Ibid, 25. 2bears is conversant with Derridean hauntology, arguing that his works act “as a conversation with spirits and specters,” which, alongside Derrida, 2bears distinguishes between the spirit and the revenant, the confrontation with the “specter” that, in turn, confronts its iteration, so that 2bears invents work “that takes place through electronic mediums and new media technologies” as “spectral conjurations wherein these ghosts of history are forced to (re)appear so that they might face up to their haunting of the living” (25-26). 134 Archer Pechawis, Indigenism: Aboriginal World View As Global Protocol,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, edited by Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 41. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid.

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imaginaries of settler culture” implies a “non-existence” or non-importance.137 Lewis responds that when “designers and developers of media technology choose what counts as knowledge, what sorts of operations we can perform on that knowledge, and how that knowledge becomes manifest in the world,” the future is rendered an inessential component of epistemological advance.138 Thus, in Lewis’ view, only by “acting as agents,” that is to say by actively engaging in this epistemological life-world already populated by spirits and traditional protocols, can Indigenous peoples “help to expand the epistemological assumptions upon which those systems and structures are based” and, finally, “stake out our own territory in a common future.”139 The relation of structure to sense is vital for Lewis, who recognizes that the interactivity of protocols as a particular structural encounter “is central to the ability to transform it, to remediate it,” and “in turn, lays the groundwork for embracing networked technology as potential sites of cultural expression”140—as stories, both “metaphor and material.”141 He concludes: “Now it is time to look forward….142 We can and should sail the old sea and the new. In so doing, we Aboriginal new media creators can contribute to developing a better dance, and better

137 Jason Edward Lewis, “A Better Dance and Better Prayers: Systems, Structures, and the Future Imaginary in Aboriginal New Media,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, edited by Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 58. 138 Ibid, 61. 139 Ibid, 63. To this end, Lewis’ Skins Workshops have, since 2003, facilitated Indigenous youth in video game making processes, linking Indigenous stories and storytelling techniques to encourage the production as a mode of interaction with digital medias—to recognize that it is and already was a tool of Indigeneity (64). As Lewis describes of the “storytelling module” of the workshop, the goal is to “immerse students in the rhythms, texture, and performance of the stories while simultaneously showing them how those stories are structured” (66). 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid, 71. 142 As Sium, Desai and Ritskes argue, for decolonization to be anything other than a “domesticated industry of ideas,” Indigenous epistemologies (and ontologies) must be the medium wherein the present is engaged and the future is possible (iv). The point is that colonialism cannot merely be acknowledged or recognized. It is both a site of contestation and a practice. As a practice, it is enacted in situ and echoed from the Nunangat to the sub-Sahara. As a practice it extends into (and onto) the matters of the world. See Aman Sium, Chandni Desai, and Eric Ritskes, “Towards the ‘Tangible Unknown’: Decolonization and the Indigenous Future,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012), i-xiii.

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prayers.”143 This is akin to what Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew called “the rhythm of the drumbeat, the language of smoke signals and our moccasin telegraph … transformed to the airwaves and modems of our times,”144 or what Angela M. Haas has called the “revision [of] the intellectual history of technology, hypertext, and multimedia studies” already there in the wampum.145 Already since time immemorial, L’Hirondelle concurs,

Indigenous peoples have been making things their own,146 but with the emergence of bits, bytes, code, “as we are bombarded with popular dominant culture, new trends, and the glut of global information, it is important to return home to our source, reflect on our history, and pay homage to the agency and ingenuity of our pathfinders.”147 Thus, Coders

North has gone some way in defining the contours of this link of the Indigenous coder standing before their source (code). Their website offers a free and “online meeting place for teachers and their students to share, learn, partner and celebrate coding and the

143 Lewis, “Dance,” 72. 144 Cheryl L’Hirondelle, “Codetalkers Recounting Signals of Survival,” Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, edited by Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2014), 147. L’Hirondelle, evoking Maskegon-Iskwew’s words after his death, adds that to be “truly free”—in Cree she notes this translation, to “tipêyimisow—s/he controls him/herself, s/he governs him/herself, s/he owns him/herself; s/he is in charge of him/herself, s/he is on his/her own, s/he is free . . .” (164)—means acknowledging the link between “pre- contact ingenuity as … technologists” (147). An important note here, though I will be forced to leave it below the treeline, are the analogical relations of old and new and Cree language. As L’Hirondelle points out, “Cree language is built on root concepts of metaphor and metonymy, so it is appropriate to start out with some analogous terminologies with which to identify my role” (148). Her essay analogically relates the writing itself—the language and the language of the essay—to the compiler as a expectant analogical technē, to the architecture of computer code and Cree (ibid). 145 Angela M. Haas, “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 4 (2007), 78. She elaborates: “wampum beads are technologies, just as sinew, hemp, and tree bark twine are—all of the technologies needed to craft wampum belt multimediated stories. Such an argument can be extended to the other sign technologies we build via an assemblage of other technologies, all which come along with their own set of "literacies," from birch bark scrolls and canoes, winter counts, petroglyphs, star quilts, songs, drums, double-wall and double-woven rivercane baskets, and more to Web sites, blogs, and instant messaging” (94). 146 L’Hirondelle, “Codetalkers,” 150. 147 L’Hirondelle, “Codetalkers,” 151. She continues by drawing a compelling analogy between compilers and compiling, old and new sources, links and linkage, regard and re:, root and route (152). L’Hirondelle’s compiler-reading culminates in a powerful analogical claim: “Returning to the first three poles of the mîkiwahp or tipi (as this infers the dynamic and well-placed beginnings of a larger structure), I offer this thought: they are a metaphor of a tripod that is draped over with the triptych-like narrative elaboration of triangulation and hence trace an Indigenous new media practice in contemporary time and space” (161-162).

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Indigenization of the digital world.”148 The site provides a library of videos with

Indigenous entrepreneurs working in digital technology, as well as lessons in coding and computational logic structured for classrooms, ranging from computational thinking149 to activities that highlight the “limitless possibilities” to “change the world through coding,” articulated through career opportunities like app creation, robotics, automation, virtual reality, web design, and software development.150 One of their contributors, Jon Corbett, a Métis coder from Winnipeg, draws out an important distinction between what he calls

“Indigetization” and “Indigetalization” that guides one of the coding modules. The former, which includes the presencing and content creation of Indigenous peoples online, while vital to the Coders North program, doesn’t change “the fundamental language of the computer system.” To this end, Corbett describes his work in the development of a Cree programming language, put forward as “a form of decolonization,” and with the goal of removing “the influence of European and Westernized cultures” from the actual writing of code “so it’s as representative of the culture as possible.” Corbett, as the realization of the Indigenous coder, therefore argues that Indigenous worldview and ontology can be constructed at the “base language level,”151 which implies in advance the logic, function,

148 Coders North is part of the Elephant Thoughts network, a teacher-run charity providing STEAM-based education, science camps, school programs, and humanitarian work in Indigenous communities in Canada. See Elephant Network, “About Us,” https://www.elephantthoughts.com/about-us/. 149 The computational thinking module of their online coding course argues that human beings have been using computational thinking—algorithmic thinking, decomposition, abstraction, and pattern recognition—since time immemorial. But, they argue, “if you want to figure out how to code,” learning to understand computational thinking, to “think like a computer,” is an essential skillset. Different modes of computational thinking are rendered in analogical relation—writing code instructions is like writing a detailed recipe; decomposition is like a dead animal that “breaks down into smaller parts”; abstraction is like a map with redundant details removed; pattern recognition is like Indigenous hunters who know the migratory paths of animals, or the climatological patterns for weather prediction. Coders North, “Computational Thinking,” 2018. 150 In one of the videos, Skawennati urges viewers that it’s imperative to “indigenize cyberspace,” that everything used online was “created by white men,” and so indigenization means creating “and using the tools.” She continues: “We have been left out, hurt, oppressed, and that’s got to change…. We have to be invited in. That’s how this is going to be fixed—to make everyone feel welcome.” Skawennati, “Indigenous Digital Art,” Coders North. 151 The programming language takes “things that the computer system wouldn’t necessarily know or know about, things like ceremony,” as with smudging’s cleansing and spiritual openings, as well as “speaking truthfully and being able to engage as openly and truthfully that I can as a person.” This is achieved analogically, as “there are actual activities that

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structure, and representation of Indigeneity qua code. In the context of digitalization, networks, and interfaces, this analogy is local to rhetoricity as a relation of old to new.152

Take for example the antimetabolic relation evoked by Michelle Kennerly and Damien

Smith Pfister between the wax tablet and the digital tablet.153 “Amid the various

(postmodernist, posthumanist) twists and (affective, materialist) turns of contemporary rhetorical theory,” they offer to inflect and “highlight” the “continuing urgency of engaging with the wisdom of the ancients.”154 In this sense, the digital tablet is (in) the impression of ancient wax and the waxing of the glow, as the pipe ceremony is in the looping process. Such is the analogical relation, the analogue to the digital, so that “what appears native to digital media ecologies”155 is the “variation” and the “way”156 of the

“predecessor,” the “path,” the “ritual.”157 In this mode, analogy is the means through which to illuminate, elucidate, and make an “anthropological claim” to the specificity of human exemplarity in what appears to be unfamiliar technological terrain.158 That is to

the computer does that are similar things,” like setting variables and cleaning out memory registers, or emptying strings, “practices that we do as computer programmers that prepare the system and get it ready for actual programming. So I actually wrote a [smudge] function that prepares and cleans the system, so it sets aside a certain amount of memory for the program to run, it prepares the variables, gets them ready and sets them to a current state of nothingness, and it’s represented as not ‘holding anything yet’ [as desbasketing].” This is coding as a mode of representational process, “of ceremony practices and methodological practices that are somewhat Indigenous” already represented in the computer system. “We just have to identify what those are.” The pipe ceremony is another example, passed around in the circle, which Corbett parses as a “looping” that “kind of shares certain properties” to the pipe ceremony. There are “variables and attributes passed along a chain and return back to the beginning,” as computer loops, that are “exactly the same thing.” The goal of the programming language is “represent the computer language in ideas and concepts they’re familiar with … and therefore hopefully making it more accessible and greater to use as a tool,” thereby engaging with the computer “on Indigenous terms and understanding.” 152 This is a constitutive relation of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ), “what Inuit have known for a long time,” sometimes translated as “what Inuit have always known to be true,” or otherwise traditional knowledge. Woven throughout the critical literature of IQ is the wrestling with this relation of what past and present, how IQ is “relevant” in the contemporary world, how to incorporate IQ into modern governmental forms and structures, administrations, and demands, and what the future of IQ will be. As this essay proceeds, the analogy will return as a question posed to this particular relation. 153 Michelle Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, “Introduction,” Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, edited by Michelle Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018), 1. 154 Ibid, 3. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid, 6. 157 Ibid, 7. 158 Ibid, 8.

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say, this rhetorical analogical relation refracts the connection of (inter)connectivity.159 But while this “pragmatic” rhetorical device serves to link the old and the new, it also works analogically in the similarity of its analogue—recursively linking (to) connectivity as analogical antimetabol. Resemblance in this analogic relation, as Deleuze might have argued, isn’t (in) the production of direction as a motion between old and new, but rather of indirection.160 This is what analogy shares with the image, and what code is in before representation: to have granted, in advance, the “real” objectivity of what is neither static nor given but rather passes continuously in the expectation of its granting. What is of code

159 Thus we have found, waiting for us, the painter standing before the canvas. 160 By making this claim, I’m building another analogical relation of indirection. For computer scientists there’s an aphorism widely attributed to Butler Lampson: “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection” (Lampson 1993). In the programming sense aphoristically implied, indirection is a capacity for the layered referencing of code so that operations can act without directly associating to the value and its location in memory, thereby granting the operations through layers to anticipate or perform complex tasks such as translation between different file systems. Lampson’s aphorism therefore names the passage through reference. The passage through reference (indirection) is already an analogy of digital rhetoric. Take Lampson, who was a part of UC Berkeley’s Project Genie in 1964, funded by then DARPA head and the “Johnny Appleseed” of computing (Waldrop 2001), J.C.R. Linklider, responsible for the release and commercialization of the SDS (Scientific Data Systems) 940 in 1967. This computer helped realize the development of so-called “timesharing” from batch processing computing—the shift, in other words, from single operation, punch card processing machine to multiprocessing and multi-tasking and compact machines whose environment can be shared among many users. This realizes the desire, in the early 1960s, to create a “creative human-machine dialogue” (Spinrad and Meagher 2007, 23), or what, in 1960, Linklider called the “ultimate paradigm for complex technological systems” in “Man-computer symbiosis” (Linklider 1960, 4, emphasis mine)—as the wasp (Blastophaga grossorum) to the fig tree in pollination (ibid). Though as Deleuze and Guattari might have responded with their own wasp analogy, this time with the orchid, perhaps this is less symbiosis than becoming, of the capture and surplus of code (Thousand, 10). A year after the SDS 940 is released, in 1968, Douglas Engelbart uses it to present the oN-Line System (NLS), developed by the Augmentation Research Centre at the Stanford Research Institute, in what has become known as the “Mother of All Demos.” Through the SDS 940 and the NLS operating system, 1968 witnesses the demonstration (is it a birth?) of what Galloway (2012) called the interface—windows, hypertext, video conferencing, real-time editing, the use of a mouse, and everything known to modern computing. Or, rather, the “windows, screens, keyboards, kiosks, channels, sockets, and holes,” the “autonomous zones of activity,” the “effects of larger forces” (vii), of navigation (7), of source code (9), of the “between” (3). So: the timeshare to the indirection to the code/r, of “progress and democratization that helped liberate … bottled-up magic” (Spinrad and Meagher, 23). As it happens, the aphorism is, by Lampson’s admission, misattributed. Lampson cites David Wheeler, a Cambridge computer scientist responsible for the subroutine that enables the granting of indirection. So it was Wheeler who said that all problems in computer science can be solved by another layer of indirection, but unlike Lampson, he added: “But that will usually create another problem” (Wood, 2010, emphasis mine). See J.C.R. Linklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (1960), 4-11; Butler Lampson, “Principles for Computer System Design,” Turing Award Lecture (1993); M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Linklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking Press, 2001); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Paul Spinrad and Patti Meagher, “Project Genie: Berkeley’s Piece of the Computer Revolution,” Forefront: College of Engineering (Berkeley: University of California, 2007), 22-25; David Wood, ed., Linking Enterprise Data (London: Springer, 2010); Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).

186 is only in the enablement of its granting. It matters not only that these images are found161 to have been distributed, seuilless, sensual, or sharing-in-relation, but rather to have been in advance of expectation.

…Waited

To return: the canvas and the subject, the diagram and the dream, the painting and the suicide, the code and the Arctic. “Through gathering and networking,” argue Igloliorte,

Nagam, and Taunton, “Indigenous voices and perspectives come together, are centrally positioned, and ultimately combat the colonial marginalization of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.”162 Gathering and networking precede and proceed, and therefore situate Indigenous peoples already “at the forefront of practice and technologically oriented methods and methodologies.”163 Claims like these are not merely about invention, but sovereignty claims.164 This is a powerful testimony that reclaims technē from the Promethean advance165 and colonial “frontier stories.”166 Yet by arguing

161 Finding, uncovering, unveiling, (and so on), are recognizable to colonial “discovery” in advance, but in the terms of this essay, invention (creativity) is carried with it. Consider that Edmundo O’Gorman’s foundational study The Invention of America opens with, and rests quite firmly on, an analogy of an archival caretaker and a scholar-identifier who, when given an unidentified text by the caretaker, recognizes it to be a previously unknown text by Aristotle. The analogy asks: who finds (discovers) Aristotle? For O’Gorman, the answer to this question positions the invention of America to the West. But also consider that, in this analogical instance, Columbus is the caretaker, the scholar is the Indigenous inhabitancy of America, and Aristotle is North America. 162 Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton, “Transmissions: The Future Possibilities of Indigenous Digital and New Media Art,” PUBLIC 54, edited by Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton (2016), 7. 163 Ibid. 164 There are of course strategic, categorical, and economic reasons that Indigenous scholars and so-called “new media” artists have identified the “longstanding relationships” that obtain in and as virtual space, not least of which the contested claims to what constitutes a “traditional” space, and indeed its very extent, the continued intellectual and cultural property rights that are every year further challenged by “content producers” (the dialectical stress of the “remix” and meme), and the protocols of Indigenous traditional knowledge as they trace the terms and forms of relationality while mediated by platform and interface. 165 What Yuk Hui means by Prometheanism is technics not as a “general human activity” that can be traced back, for example, to the rhythm of the clanking of the Achulean biface (Tomlinson, 90), but rather as a “philosophical concept” that can’t be properly thought of as universal” (Yuk, 9-10). For Yuk, Prometheanism names the mythical “germ” of the Western philosophy of technē (11) in the sense that mythos passes into logos without thereby losing this “germinal form” (ibid). The universalism of technicity encounters not the problem of the human use of technology, but rather the retention of the passage of logos from mythos named in the story of Promethean fire. This, for Yuk, is a “subtle form of colonialism” (12) when elevated to universal culture. As Yuk draws out from Aeschylus, Prometheus isn’t only the

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that Indigeneity, as the voice and the gathering, is in the “preceding” and “proceeding” (to) digital space, thus finding Indigenous territory there in advance, connectivity is granted in advance of the correspondence to time immemoriality. In this formula, code is the expectation of sharing-in-relation that finds itself already indigenous to the territory. But the Arctic, where the figure of the Inuit coder is in approach of the expectancy of what grants passage,167 we will not only have found sharing-in-relation in advance, but the naming-of. By approaching code as the in advance of the granting of the passage, I have named code analogically—not as the analogy “between” territory and cyberspace, spirit and technē, but rather of the passage of the (in) advance. The passage is the in advance of the future, the expectation of what waits in the future. The future is the standing before, of the “coming together,” of the gathering, of the expectation. If, as I have argued, here and elsewhere, the future of the Arctic is in “the end of the Arctic,” the enablement of the granting of the passage, code, therefore, is analogical to the Arctic before it is digital. Its

didasklos technes pasēs, the father of technicity, but rather the mythical origin point of human arithmon, the use of numbers, as well as wisdom, memory, and writing (14). In the gift of fire is the transcendence of human being and the rise of culture from technē as an external object from world (16). Yuk and Tomlinson therefore share in common the goal to describe technicity and scientific thinking as an expression of the “relations between humans and their milieus, which are never static” (18). Presumably this kind of thinking is what Alexander Galloway has in mind when he suggests that the distinction drawn between the use of “tech” and the being of tech depends on the delinking of “math and code from culture and politics” (Galloway, 2019). Math and code are therefore, according to Galloway, reckoned as other than medium, and therefore avoid the question of race and culture. As with the Promethean germ, technē is the bedrock upon which architecture builds, rather than the space through which things emerge in co-constitution. Thus mathematics and code contain for Galloway an “essential bias” perpetuated “since the ancients through an elemental typing (or gendering), and that within such typing there exists a general segregation or prohibition on the mixing of types, and that the two core types themselves (geometry and arithmetic) are mutually intertwined using notions of hierarchy, foreignness, priority, and origin” (ibid). Each of these authors are differently concerned with theorizing the medium of emergence, that is, of technicity as a medium of material immanence. In this essay, however, I have argued that analogy is the waiting for the in advance of the granting of the passage. This waiting returns the sharing-in-relation of the effacement of the sovereign. But in this effacement is, in turn, the constitutive movement of the sovereign to the future that waits. I have ultimately argued that the end of the Arctic is this rhetoricity, the contemporary rhetoric of sovereignty in the Arctic. This is its formula: the enablement of the granting of the passage. See Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016); Gary Tomlinson, Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Alexander Galloway, “Are Algorithms Biased?,” January 26, 2019, accessed at: http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/are-algorithms- biased#more-1653. 166 Haas, “Hypertext,” 82. 167 One name is the epidemic, the suicide. Another is the approach of connectivity in the “opening,” the end of the Arctic.

188 analogy is “before” not in the sense of being prior, but rather as the waiting in advance of what is granted in passage in (to) it. Another rhetoric of this expectation is named in Inuit suicide, the waiting of the granting of the passage as the in advance of expectation. Code, with suicide, is, in the end, not merely mediatory or mediating, as “opening,” economic, digital, or in the differentiation of the immanence of the between, but in advance of the expectation of what waited.168 This is not the future of the Arctic—it is the end of the

Arctic.

168 The Analogy.

189 In Conclusion

The previous chapter has come to a difficult proposition. If suicide is “with” code in analogy, the in advance of the expectation of what waited, then Arctic rhetoric has returned “us” to the enablement of the end of the Arctic. In turn, as we opened, this means a turn from sharing-in-relation, the effacement that waits in conclusion—to return to the question of ice and age of retreat—the first turn to finitude.

Martin Hägglund begins his most recent book with a story of standing on the cliffs of northern Sweden where he was born, overlooking the Baltic Sea. In his telling, it’s a dramatic landscape, and no doubt it is precisely that, carved out, he continues, “by the descent of the ice from the last glacial period, twelve thousand years ago.”1 So returns to the Great Ice Age and its retreat, the end and the opening. The glacial retreat still forms the land, allowing it to rise, to “emerge,” so that the sandy bottom of the sea of his mother’s childhood is now part of their garden. “The rocks under my feet,” he continues,

“are a reminder of the geological time in which we are but a speck. Being there,” on the cliffs, yes, and in the retreat of that geological time that takes him to the garden of memory, “the brevity of my life is made salient by the forms of time to which I am recalled.”2 So the story proceeds until he climbs the old mountain,3 seeing there “the scale of glacial time, still forming the landscape in which we find ourselves.”4 Hägglund is, all of us are, dependent on what we follow from, of generations and the history of the Earth

1 Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 3. 2 Ibid. 3 “—On an eternal ground, on hard primary rock, on this highest, hardest, primary mountain-ridge, unto which all winds come, as unto the storm-parting, asking Where? and Whence? and Whither?” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common (New York: The Modern Library, 1935), 266. 4 Hägglund, Life, ibid.

190 “that so easily could have been different,” because the future is not given, he thinks. And so a life that is in history, on an Earth that is, but “might never have brought any of us into being.”5 The glacial retreat is thus, as the enablement of rhetoricity, finitude.

This will require some elaboration. For Hägglund, being finite is the dependence on others and the relation to death. Being finite is the very condition upon which human life comes to matter and mean anything at all, for eternity would evacuate being from world.

In a different book, he writes that finitude is the “self-refuting as such,” the irreducible non-presence.6 While the future is not given, it’s not-being-given is given in its finitude, for there is a future whose possibility for not being given “is,” as such, given in its constitutive not-being-able. Thus, finitude is the very condition for posing the question of intelligibility, underlying the very structure of questioning the implicit dependence that issues from our constitutive not-being-able. An eternity of life would mean a lasting- forever, and this lasting-forever would mean that life would have no stake in answering to relationality and dependence. Lasting-forever does not follow intelligibility of meaning.

Yet this finitude is also what grounds irreplaceability, for finitude “is inseparable from my sense” of the end. Consider that Hägglund’s reading of finitude follows from Derrida, who argues that finitude is (in) the unconditional exposure. Being in time means sharing- in-relation insofar as the unconditional, as espacement, is the non-coincidence of the event with itself—the no longer and to come of every event.7 Eternity is the in-itself of the event, and thus the pure presence of the sovereign.8 The pure presence of the sovereign is both unthinkable and unavailable because it is outside of time, and therefore

5 Ibid, 4. 6 Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 93. 7 Ibid, 29. 8 Ibid, 30.

191 the end of time. But the coming of time is the exceeding of any end, promising only to never fulfill itself.9 This “sense” of finitude, the “existential sense”10 of the “sense it will not last forever,”11 is what Hägglund calls “secular faith,” the devotion to the life of the end that expresses the ought enabling the meaning and intelligibility of intention and intentionality without givenness. In other words, secular because of its being “bounded by time,” in the sense of being-toward-the-end, and faith in the sense of sharing a being of the “worldly” and “temporal.” This worldly temporal boundedness toward the end is expressed as a movement of life-form toward the care of others given in the postponement of death and the improvement of life—not as an infinite return or extension, but rather as the elongation of living well.

Finitude therefore is in some sense a matter of duration, and so returns finitude

“within itself.” Thus is named the intrinsic mattering of finite life as the necessary risk of the end. The end of finitude is the movement of secular faith’s fidelity to its intensive practice—life, community, institution, politics. Normative ideals are further expressions of finitude’s constitutive not-being-able, its “keeping faith” to be, risked, transformed, over-turned. In this context, Hägglund names climate change the “most fundamental example of finitude in our historical moment,” the “prospect that the Earth itself will be destroyed.”12 Only finitude, which is to say secular faith, can answer to the existential persuasion of climate change, for the religious faith of eternity cannot help but disregard the termination of finite life. The end of the world is therefore never a tragedy for eternity,

9 Ibid, 137. “A promise has meaning and gravity only on the condition of death” (138). “Due to a constitutive finitude,” therefore, “every affirmation is inhabited by negation from the start, and even the most active embrace of life cannot be immune from the reactive mourning of death” (162). 10 Hägglund, Life, 193. 11 Ibid, 5. 12 Ibid, 8.

192 for the world is-as-in the totalization of eternity’s sovereignty. Even the katechōn only vouchsafes the end as an is, in this sense—to be a true withholding, it must speak the name of finitude and not God. “Our” ecological crisis “can be taken seriously only from the standpoint” of finitude, and it is only the finitude of dependence and relation—of following—that “sustainable forms of life on Earth” may be committed to “as an end in itself.”13 Rosi Baridotti and Rick Dolphijn concur here, arguing that the “crises that mark today’s world” show how “we” “come after nature,” in the sense of “facing disastrous consequences of our reckless exploitation of the planetary resources” and “in understanding the role played by our capitalist culture and market economy in both unsettling the nature-culture divide and in complicating it further through all-pervasive technological mediation.”14 Ergo, the ostensible separation between human and non- human, habitat and inhabitation, is challenged by “the shared anxiety” of the

Anthropocene, climate change and economic globalization.15 Following Deleuze, and recognizing capitalism as the material driver of never-ending accumulative growth, the authors posit the “cooperative vision of human relationality.”16 Capitalism, understood here as a “demented” decoding and deterritorializing securing of flows, is recognized as the “negative of society, of culture, of any kind of social formation.”17 The undoing of capitalist movement and its “transcendent force” rests upon the “systemic undoing of the ties that bind the clever animal—Anthropos—to nature.”18 Capitalism, as the cut or the severing, “allows”—perhaps we could say enables—the “undoing of the territorial,

13 Ibid. 14 Rosi Baridotti and Rick Dolphijn, “Introduction: Philosophy After Nature,” Philosophy After Nature, edited by Rosi Baridotti and Rick Dolphijn (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 1-2. 15 Ibid, 2. 16 Ibid, 3. 17 Ibid, 4. As we saw in the Introduction, the “human face” of the “right to be cold” makes a similar claim about the outcome of capitalist enterprise and human inter-connectivity. 18 Ibid, 5.

193 planetary” and social “ties that have enabled life in the first place.”19 Among other things, the uniformizing ideal of progress, as they put it, “blinded us to the immanence of life” and “alienated us from the different futures that were not in line with the

Enlightenment.”20 Thus, modernity has “realized” the “future it anticipated, including a massive ecological crisis that may have revealed itself only recently but is here to stay.”21

Needed, then, is a philosophy “after nature,” one that is “able to read the undercurrents in thought, in the earth, giving rise to another earth” on the “other side of thought.”22

Has “rhetoric” not called toward its own naming in this need? But perhaps there is something else, something that enables rhetoric, something that is-not, as such. In times of severe crisis, they continue, the new earth emerges, the search for it through the

“missing ‘we’ which can be collaboratively thought about—actualized—in thinking together.”23 Hägglund will concur as least this far. Without finitude, he says, there is no responsibility toward others or toward us—the turning toward that is the seeking of relationality, of dependency. Commitment to the other is therefore the first and final mode of finitude’s being-toward, the motivational force of time, the binding to

“something other than,”24 and the responsiveness that grants freedom and its commitments and care. Finitude is, in the first instance, the enablement of change.

Finitude, the being-toward-the-end: “This is not the end of responsibility; it is the beginning.”25 Serres also concurs here in characteristic poetic language: “Matter and mirror, media and messages, white and sprouting multiple colour lines, a bedecked gamut

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid, 6. 21 Ibid, emphasis mine. 22 Ibid, 11. 23 Ibid, 22, emphasis mine. 24 Hägglund, Life, 170. 25 Ibid, 123.

194 of a thousand reflections—I, too, am the cornucopia, the multiplicity of reality downstream and the possibility of limits upstream. Like everyone else.”26 For Serres, the wind, the desert, the river, all have writing, style, musical partition, all leave remains, and mark—as Bodin’s sovereign, perhaps, or is it the trace?—“itself” and remain “etched on soft rock.”27 The climate leaves traces too, “in dust buried in the deep ice of the poles and the ice sheets,” and everything, ultimately, codes in the language of mathematics, everything counts, the digits multiply. “The world,” Serres concludes, “so here it is.”28 If the Earth is an object of care, no matter whether it concerns resource or human finitude, the “awareness of its precarious existence is an intrinsic part of why we care about it.”

The very condition upon which care is enabled “in the light of risk,” as Hägglund puts it, the “necessary” condition for “motivating” ethical, political, and filial commitments.29

In Chapter 1, I argued that the end of the Arctic is the enablement of Arctic rhetoric, a being-posed-with “rhetoricity at the end of the world,” as the constriction around finitude in the form of habitability. Climate change is existential in this sense not because of its violence, which is quintessential,30 but because it is the opening to finitude’s call to us. In other words, finitude is what moves sovereignty, because it is found to have been non-present in advance of sharing-in-relation, and returning infinitely

26 Michel Serres, Information and Thinking,” Philosophy After Nature, edited by Rosi Baridotti and Rick Dolphijn (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 47. 27 Ibid, 39. 28 Ibid, 40. 29 Hägglund, Life, 10. 30 Thomas Nagel has argued that death is the ceasing-to-be, or the vanishing (of) possibility (224) that, in turn, speaks the shared nothingness that attends the apprehension of the expectation (226). The “expectation of nothingness” is the sharing in relation of finitude (225). But we also can’t fully acknowledge the expectation of what attends us, and we can’t “contain” it, and we can’t stand “in the full light” of it (231)—but this is what we share in the truth of finitude. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For the “quintessential” violence of taking and ending life, see Garrett Thomson, Needs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

195 upon its own finitude. In contrast to Hegel’s ceasing to be of the ceasing-to-be,31 the

“infinite finitude,” as Hägglund once argued of différance, is the self-refutation of being- itself.32 There is no originary being for being to be or become, and in this “negative constitution” is our being.33 As repetition is the condition of action, as Deleuze has it, I found rhythmicity as the enabling and immanent force of the end of the Arctic. Recall that rhythm is the orientation toward emergence, the opening, which in ecological rhetoric is the “energy” of relational forces of the world. These relational worldly forces of interaction are in the process of translation, calling for what Muckelbauer called a “style of engagement,” insofar as they define the extensive encounters that define the identities of the instance—rhetor, sovereign, or World being notable examples. The singular encounter is the way in which the repetition of the dialectical identity is inhabited by its enabling rhythm. Through this rhetorical process, the sovereign is evacuated and sharing- in-relation returns from the future. The spacetime moving the Arctic, therefore, was finitude. In Chapter 2, I continued to interrogate this spacetime in the imitation of the body of the seal, where the recognition of nonrecognition, the unrecognizability of the model in the copy, found the lack of the sovereign in the shared relation of finitude. This is what I called the granting of the passage, a rhetoricity found to have been rhetorical in advance as a finite movement plotted through the physical, biological, and ecological imitation of the infinite—the granting of the is-not that is always and unconditionally open, and the what which cannot-be-added-or-subtracted from that which is the given being of finitude. It is this finitude that answers to the body of the seal in advance as a

31 G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 108. 32 Hägglund, Atheism, 93-94. 33 Ibid.

196 sharing-in-relation. It is not only that rhetoric emerges here in the constitutive vulnerability of the body, as with the body of the seal to the effects of climate change, but rather that there is a “second finitude” wherein we are cast into the infinite “loose ends” of what will-have-been not under our control, as Davis put it. That is, the time immemorial relation between Inuit and the body of the seal are recast by the climate change debate within the realm of shared finitude, but sharing-in-relation makes that finitude the constitutive not-having of being—the casting out of the sovereign in advance.

In this sense, the body of the seal is found to have been in advance of the constitutive being that we all share and have no part in controlling. Thus Hägglund describes finitude as the condition of responsibility, underwriting the recognition of “shared,” of “our” vulnerability, and the intelligible demand for mutuality in the first place. This is where emancipatory potential is finally located: the “possibility” without guarantee, the movement without the end, and through this recognition of possibility and lack of guarantee, the founding of institutional and political movements that answer to, and reflect, the constitutive in-ability of sharing-in-relation.

As I explored in Chapter 3, this strongly opposes the atiq. I have shown that the atiq, rather than an undoing or opposition to death, is the carrying of the seeking of both life and death rather than the giving of the seeking that survives beyond death. The namesake of the atiq named itself from without the body of Chapter 3, of but not in the body (of the text), in the seeking of the body after it is before us. Of course, Hägglund’s finitude is very far indeed (is it?) from Indigenous namesake and spirit. If, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has highlighted, “governments (and other parties) now have an obligation to assist Indigenous communities to restore their own spiritual belief systems and faith practices where these have been damaged or subjected to spiritual

197 violence through past laws, policies, and practices,”34 Hägglund would perhaps respond with a nod of approval. “Of course,” he would respond, for “even if you identify as religious you can still care intensely for the fate of our life on Earth.”35 But given the constitutive in-ability of interconnection of sharing-in-relation, the tracing of time that is the finitude of this sharing, the movement of the atiq is always a mode of unfreedom, and therefore a closure and a withholding of the finitude we all share. Nevertheless, it is not an unfreedom that fundamentally effaces sharing-in-relation, for the material conditions decide on the capacity to ask what “we” ought to do with our lives and how, and those material conditions are imagined otherwise than remote communities in the Arctic. Yet, I have also argued that Arctic rhetoric is enabled by the end and the opening, and the implications of this mean that the matters of our sharing-in-relation are plotted through the end of the Arctic. If, as the TRC remarks, “No one should be told who is, or how to worship, their Creator,” Hägglund would reply that no one does make this demand. For even if the settler state makes its systemic demands on the peoples which it has and continues to subjugate, in law and economy and housing and technē, as is the case in

Canada, finitude is always its own call, the call of the name. Robert McGhee once wrote that the shamanic “view of the universe” was very different from the modern world.

Rather than a sphere spinning through an endless dark around a blazing star, the shamanic universe is one of stacked planes, the movement of forces between the planes explaining the cycles of ends and openings.36 World and adaptations, McGhee continues, implies, if it does not implicate, “a great time-depth for human occupation of the polar regions.”

34 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Honouring the Truth, Reconciling For the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada” (Ottawa, 2015), 226. 35 Hägglund, Life, 9, emphasis mine. 36 Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39-40.

198 This great time-depth reveals that no “Arctic society has simply lived and developed in its local area since time immemorial, or since the end of the Ice Age.”37 The image that approaches in this story is the great respiration of the planet, the planetary breathing, the pulse of the atmosphere, “As the Earth, our nurse, which is globed around the pole that stretches through all.”38 No planes, then, no layers, no movement between them, whether of or on the Internet, at the interface, in the body, in the dream, nowhere at all, nothing but for enablement. Arctic rhetoric, we might now see in its full “light,” as the enablement of the granting of the passage, was already the “rhetoric of the Arctic” in the climate change era—whether the melting of the Northwest Passage or the permafrost, whether the opening to data centres and coding, whether, whether, whether, weather.

If we are made of what we follow, as Foucault once said, then perhaps Hägglund is right to say that finitude is the condition of spiritual freedom: “not to be sovereign or liberated from all constraints,” but in an opening to questioning through normative engagement in the end as the structure and condition of our temporality.39 “What we should do with our time” is the formula he gives for freedom. This asking—what should I do with my time?—is the responsibility of finitude, which is always shared and following, and which “runs the risk of being bored” lest the engagement be a matter of necessity.40

The condition of freedom is the knowledge of finitude, lived in relation to the fragility of shared finitude and the non-givenness of the future, and the apprehension “that our lifetime is indefinite but finite.”41 Religious visions of eternity, in contrast, are

37 Ibid, 41. 38 Plato, The Timeaus of Plato, edited by R.D Archer-Hind (London: Macmillan, 1888), 40b. 39 Hägglund, Life, 11. 40 Ibid, 5. 41 Ibid, 13. Perhaps this is like Piliriqatigiingniq, the concept of working together for a common purpose, part of the Piqujangit, or commonp laws or urpose. But of course, as we have seen, the “common” splits along the line of the sovereign, which is called but never answers for there is-not in finitude. See Nunavut Department of Education, “Inuit

199 “unfreedom,” for they delimit and disappear the sharing of “free relation” to which our finitude compels “us.”42 The Weberian disenchantment of the world43 has as its fundamental flaw, by positing the void given by the subtraction of religious norms and values, what Hägglund calls the “modern achievement” of freedom. Our commitments are what establish norms and the justification of practices, which cannot be underwritten or enabled by the eternity of religious faith or “natural properties.” Suicide, then, “means that I am failing to lead a meaningful life,”44 because death cannot compel toward the end of life—death excludes existence, it is only there as the un-able of finitude’s being- toward-the-end.

I have said in Chapter 3 that the suicide is analogical. The suicide is analogical, I argued, in that is it of the passage which is granted in the opening of enablement. Recall that when the concept of sovereignty was introduced to Inuit, in the form of trade, in the form of policing, in the form of housing, in the form of allowance, but also in the form of language, Inuktut had no word for it. The translation of the word, which Qitsualik-Tinsley called “chimeric,” was therefore given as aulatsigunnarniq. The translation for this word into English was “the ability to make things move.” I have engaged in this misreading toward the emergence of the enablement of Arctic rhetoric. Inuit sovereignty, by contrast, as posited by Qitsualik-Tinsley, is the unification of isuma and tarniq with the triune of

Qaujimajatuqangit: Education Framework for Nunavut Curriculum” (2007), 33, accessed at: https://www.gov.nu.ca/sites/default/files/files/Inuit%20Qaujimajatuqangit%20ENG.pdf. It has also been translated as working collaboratively as a team. See Joe Karetak et al., Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known To Be True, edited by Joe Karetak et al. (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 228. 42 Ibid. 43 See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” The Vocation Lectures, edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 1-31. 44 Hägglund, Life, 18.

200 Imaq, Nuna, and Sila.45 Qitsualik-Tinsley of course can’t locate either the transcendence of the sovereign, the outside that rhetoricity at the end of the world refuses, or the Inuit being in the world, and so argues that Inuit sovereignty, or sovereignty in classical Inuit thought, is the making of a human being.46 As I have argued, it is not only that the human being is unseated as both presence and sovereign in the world by material rhetoricity, but rather that the compelling force of the rhetoricity—I have named it enablement, but it might take the name rhythm as it has with Deleuze and Muckelbauer, or finitude, as it has with Davis and Hägglund—in the “worldly rhetoric,” as Rickert put it, is the risk of future.

Therefore, in the end of the Arctic is the call of finitude, the approach of what signifies the coming of sharing-in-relation. But, at once, they have waited for the end of the Arctic to open, to have shown waiting there that the terms of the sharing-in-relation were in advance. Rhetoricity is found to have been indigenous to the future as finitude, an ability to make things move, to make us move, and in doing so to move in the rhythm of the world the sovereign to the future as the chimera. Inuit sovereignty is both recognized, in enablement, and a matter of nonrecognition, in the granting of passage. The analogy is therefore not the relation between two identities, for the identities have been granted only

45 Rachel A. Qitsualik, “Innumarik: Self-Sovereignty in Classic Inuit Thought,” in Nilliajut: Inuit Perspectives on Security, Patriotism, and Sovereignty (Ottawa: Inuit Tapariit Kanatami, 2013), 30. It’s worth quoting significantly from Qitsualik-Tinsley here, not in the body: “The triune complex of Water-Land-Sky urges, then, is not only accessed by Inuit as a way to view relation between environmental forces, but also psychological and spiritual ones; hence, the complex of Water-Land-Sky is reflected in the human condition as uumaniq-inua-anirniq (e.g., life instinct— awareness—higher potential). The balance and interaction between these urges creates what is known as a ‘person’ (actually, these urges are found everywhere in different admixtures, but Inuit focus on how they manifest in the human). The interaction between Water and Land (in the human, uumaniq + inua), may therefore be said to result in isuma: the personal thoughts and feelings unique to an individual. On the other side — though not in conflict, but balance—the interaction between Land and Sky (in the human, inua + anirniq), may be said to result in tarniq: the subtle selfhood or ‘soul’ of an individual. Thus, in each case, is the midpoint, individually inua, cosmologically Nuna, the urge that is refined and defined by oscillation between infra- and ultra-personal aspects of selfhood. Further, we can now observe that—just as it is the substance of the Land, modified by the accidents of Water and Sky interplay, that must preoccupy Inuit for the sake of workaday subsistence—it is the substantial humanness, modified by the accidents of uumaniq and anirniq interplay, that must remain of interest to Inuit on psychological, spiritual, and social levels.” 46 I mean this in the sense of inunnguqsajauniq (to be made into a human being) or inunnguiniq (making a human being, or making a human being “who will be able to help others with a good heart”). Atuat Akittiq and Rhoda Akpaliapik Karetak, “Inunnguiniq (Making a Human Being),” Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known To Be True, edited by Joe Karetak et al. (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2018), 112.

201 by the enablement, but rather the passage of the in advance that waited. The suicide, then, is analogical in the sense that it waited for the granting of passage—for the end of the

Arctic.

Here, in conclusion, we have been in approach of this as finitude. The nonsovereign freedom proposed is thus a feature of the material conditions and resources to which those who ask the question about meaningful life ultimately have access. The irreducible is always the time of our lives, the following and sharing that names finitude.

Freedom requires the capacity to “own the question of what to do with our time” and not the final end of what that ownership would entail. There is-not an entailing end to the ownership of that question, for the goal is only to realize the possibility of freedom that is the constitutive inability of the withholding that finitude is. This matters especially right now, in the historical now, because “social inequality, climate change, and global injustice are intertwined with the resurgence of”47 forms of authority that appeal to eternity, or the end-as-itself. Any form of belief “in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless response … a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature”48 is undesirable. In other words, a life that does not fulfill the enablement of following or relationality that is finitude, which grants the conditions of freedom, and thus the passage of emancipation in the form of “living on.”49 Living on the prolonging of temporality in life, distinguished from the formless existence of eternity. The death of the other serves as a useful example here. The death creates the longing of the return that the religious faith cannot reconcile in the act of mourning. Mourning is the call to the return of what cannot return, and thus the apprehension of the possibility of breaking down of

47 Hägglund, Life, 383. 48 Ibid, 28. 49 Ibid, 6-7.

202 time. The timeless and the eternal would not allow, Hägglund argues, for the vitality of love as the possibility of loss. Finitude therefore “reverberates in every aspect”50 of life, and living on “does not protect you against the regret” of what conditions the breaking down of time and world. The “passion and the pathos of living with your beloved are therefore incompatible with the security of an eternal life.”51 In this sense, and sense is an operative word here, the experience of time as the reverberation of finitude is equally the

“possibility of coming into being, living on, and being motivated to act,” the motivation as a sustainment of the course of action that is given in the non-givenness of the future.

Any modification of the fissure of this constitutive inability of finitude, whether in

Augustine’s God or Spinozan sublation,52 is the mere expression of an escape into the formlessness of eternity of unfreedom. For anything to become a condition of “mattering,” for “anything to be at stake,” finitude is the condition qua existential commitment, necessary uncertainty, and motivational force.

Over and over again, Hägglund renders eternity—whether in Nature, or Charles

Taylor’s “gathering” of the instant53—as the other of continuance, following, and passage.

Mourning confronts not the desire for an “always” of eternity, but the living-on-of- finitude, the continuance that persists in the motivational force of finitude’s constitutive being-toward-the-end. The projection of time into the future is the “minimal form of living on, which is the condition for all forms” of gathering time. It is living on, then, the motivational force of continuance, which “makes it possible to bind the past to the

50 Ibid, 43. 51 Ibid, 44. 52 Ibid, 47. 53 Ibid, 57.

203 future—to make our lives last and hold together beyond the moment”54 without reducing to the eternal present. It is, rather, the enablement of the sustainment of commitment and the marking of the “inherent fragility of the binding activity” and bond of mattering. The sense of mattering, that is to say, “emerges from,”55 of finitude, “which sustains the commitment to a finite and fragile form of life.”56 Death is the risk of the future, for death is not available to us individually, and thus is the enablement of all that finitude motivates, follows, and relates. Eternity, the stilling of finitude’s motivation, would consume us.

“Our” finitude is “not in itself a restriction,” in the sense that finitude is a givenness toward the “our,” which follows us and has waited for us, and which conditions our relation together in the being-toward-the-end. The con(s)trainment of finitude’s barriers is always what sustains, the “opening us to the world and to others.”57 This is the recognition of mutual dependence that conditions “any form of active commitment.”58 To be committed at all is already to have recognized in advance the finitude we all share.

Climate change, as the “most pressing issue of our time,” is an “ecological crisis” that stands as a “stark reminder that our lives depend not only on the fragile self-maintenance of our material bodies but also on the fragile material self-maintenance of the global ecosystem to which we belong.”59

Recall the rocks under Hägglund’s feet whispering to him the old time of glacial withdrawal. I can’t help but agree with him when he says that climate change is the “most fundamental example” of finitude at this time. He looks out over the Baltic Sea and

54 Ibid, 58. 55 Ibid, 68. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid, 82. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid, 380.

204 recognizes a great retreat, as though in the rhythmic exhalation of the new world he could almost hear, maybe just, maybe as a dream, an old promise. He climbs, as we all climb, the mountain to the gate of Eternity, to the mirror, and we find that nothing is there to look into. But this isn’t true after all, for we have found ourselves waiting there, waiting to look out at the opening of repetition, the end that opened to us the name of the promise.

Zarathustra, too, only looked out to the eternal return in the nightmare and the crisis. The future of the Arctic is there, as the bridge that waited for the end, as the myth that waited for the name, as the human that waited for the promise. So goes the compelling force that moved sovereignty to the future that waited, where it took the name finitude.

Arctic rhetoric is so old now. Maybe it’s just a story.

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